Chapter 1. Creating Consumer-Friendly Reports

One of the biggest advantages of creating reports in IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence (BI) is that you can now create one (or more) reports that can be designed to match how business users process information. These consumers do not need to wade through waves of report pages. A series of small reports that independently focus on specific information can link to other reports. We will take a look at using drill-through in the next chapter, but you should look for ways to simplify the reports at every opportunity.

This means you, as the report author, should look for ways to present the data in a format that makes the exploration process easier for the consumers. This chapter provides examples of simple reports that present data.

In our training classes, we regularly hear from students who want to create very complex reports. We begin by asking what the users need to accomplish with the report and begin to build the report using an iterative building block process.

This chapter presents several reports that are designed to leverage features to create reports that focus on a specific task.