Reporting on ‘% of base’ in Cognos10
A workaround for the lack of ‘% of base’ functionality in Business Insight Advanced
A common requirement is to be able to product % of total or ‘% of portfolio’ reports, for comparative analysis. Unfortunately, this capability is currently missing in Business Insight Advanced. A workaround exists, which is to use the ‘% of’ calculation provided in Business Insight Advanced to hard-code the total value. However this introduces excessive report maintenance implications.
An alternative approach is to use Analysis Studio, which does support % of base, to ‘author’ the basic report layout required, then finish the report in Business Insight Advanced. (Note, however, that it is currently not possible to open an Analysis Studio view in Business Insight Advanced – it is necessary to open the view in Report Studio first, save to Cognos Connection, from where it can then be opened in Business Insight Advanced)
Example
In the following example, we are looking to create a sectioned report, showing % of total for each column in the report. Starting in Analysis Studio, we have a crosstab like this:
Since Analysis Studio does not report ‘Section’ functionality (as is available in Query Studio, Report Studio and BIA), this will have to be added later.
The first step in Analysis Studio will be to add the desired measure as a nested level within the crosstab view (this will simplify creation of the % calculations later):
Next, the ‘% of total’ calculation will be added:
Next, an additional dimension will be added, which will form the rows of each section in the final report:
This view can now opened directly into Report Studio, or saved to Cognos Connection:
From Report Studio, the report can now be saved back to Cognos Connection (under a new name), which will finally enable it to be opened in Business Insight Advanced:
(Note: it is hoped that Cognos will improve the inter-Studio workflow in future versions, to enable Analysis Studio view to be opened directly into Business Insight Advanced, either from within Analysis Studio or from Cognos Connection)
This view can now opened directly into Report Studio, or saved to Cognos Connection:
Note the automatic creation of subtotals for rows and columns:
In the context of report sections, this is entirely unnecessary. However, currently within BIA there is no easy way to add/remove nested subtotals. After manually cutting out each of the superfluous totals, and sectioning the report (using the Section/Unsection button), we end up with the required report layout:
Summary
It had been hoped that Cognos 10 would introduce some level of Studio ‘rationalization’ in order to simplify the workflow for Business Analysts in particular. Unfortunately, the introduction of Business Insight Advanced (BIA) and Business Insight has thus far only added 2 new Studios without rendering any of the existing Studios redundant. It is to be hoped that in future versions, it will be less necessary to jump around several Cognos interfaces in order to construct what are relatively simply reports.
Footnote: It turns out this is trivially easy to do in Tableau (around 9 mouse clicks) and, ironically, in PowerPlay Client (5 mouse clicks).
