FM, admin, and consultants

[bdbits]

Management here is considering hiring Cognos consultants to help get through the backlog of work here, including modelling. It is my understanding you need admin rights to effectively use FM. This presents problems in that giving admin to a consultant would give them access to everything on the dev server, including packages that expose personally identifiable information (e.g. court records, I currently work in government).

Is there a way to set up FM for a developer to have everything local to their box without spending a ton of money for Cognos licenses? My thought is to set them up completely local, then when they have completed a model we would copy it to our dev environment and publish it there. Or is there a better way to do this short of giving them admin access to servers?

I'd also be interested to hear if anyone here outsources modelling. Personally I am hesitant, as the model (at database or Cognos levels) is core to the effectiveness of the BI approach. Not to mention the difficulties of actually finding someone with good modelling skills and getting them into our particular subject areas.

[Lynn]

I have been consulting as an independent for most of my career. I do modeling as well as reporting, among other data warehouse related roles. Often these have been clients relatively new to Cognos so part of my role typically includes helping them define best practices, standards and guidelines, etc.

Along the way I have seen other consultants who charge a fortune and leave a royal mess in their wake. I would suggest that close management, peer review of their work, and ensuring that your own guidelines and expectations are up to date and well documented. Too many consultants are loathe to leave a scrap of documentation behind so be sure to insist upon it and review it before they go. If you have any documentation templates or standards in place be sure they follow those. I think that when IT people do get around to documentation it often fails to meet the objective and simply regurgitates a lot of obvious things one could see for themselves. The question often left hanging is "why?" something was done in a particular way. Your transition plan to take over their work should begin within a day or two of when they start, not moments before they leave, so consider documentation as only one aspect of a good transition. I have a series of document templates that I use and specific strategies I suggest in this regard, so it might be good when interviewing consultants to ask for samples of these things.

Good resources can be challenging to find so consider adapting your plans in terms of roles and responsibilities based on the skills you find. A solid technical person paired with an in-house BA, for example, might work if you don't find a modeler with great domain experience or adequate customer facing/analyst abilities. If you plan to hire (or already have) a junior resource consider having them shadow and collaborate with the consultant if you get a consultant with any sort of training/mentoring experience. Maybe a good report developer on your staff wants to move into modeling....could be a great way to kick start their move in that direction (of course I'd always suggest formal training is important also).

Another plus to consider is that a good consultant can bring in a fresh perspective and new ideas. At the very least it is a good chance to review how you do things to see if your guns-for-hire can illuminate any opportunities to refine and improve your processes and approaches. Ask about how things are done elsewhere that might be worth considering in your shop so you can get the most from the engagement. The bottom line is that you may have additional resources at your disposal so figure out the best way to use them in conjunction with the resources you already have.

I'll leave the permissions and license questions to those better able to answer since I generally don't have very much to do with the admin side of life. Good luck!!

[cognostechie]

Management here is considering hiring Cognos consultants to help get through the backlog of work here, including modelling. It is my understanding you need admin rights to effectively use FM. This presents problems in that giving admin to a consultant would give them access to everything on the dev server, including packages that expose personally identifiable information (e.g. court records, I currently work in government).

Is there a way to set up FM for a developer to have everything local to their box without spending a ton of money for Cognos licenses? My thought is to set them up completely local, then when they have completed a model we would copy it to our dev environment and publish it there. Or is there a better way to do this short of giving them admin access to servers?

I'd also be interested to hear if anyone here outsources modelling. Personally I am hesitant, as the model (at database or Cognos levels) is core to the effectiveness of the BI approach. Not to mention the difficulties of actually finding someone with good modelling skills and getting them into our particular subject areas.

IBM has changed the licensing model and I almost chewed up their brains to understand where we stand with it. This happened 2 months ago. It is not neccesary to have admin privileges to use FM. The current licensing model has separate cost for admin and separate cost for FM/Transformer developer. The admin license includes Performance Modeler Cube Designer for Dynamic Cubes so anybody who has even 1 admin license is automatically licensed to build Dynamic Cubes but for FM and Transformer, the admin license is not required. That comes under a separate item called 'IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Analytics Explorer'. The admin is called 'IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Analytics Administrator'. There is no difference anymore between the person who makes a RS report and who runs the report (no difference between consumer or developer for reports). The 'user' license is called 'IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Analytics User'.   Moreover all this is hierarchial so as an example:

User License - 100
Explorer license - 5
Admin license - 2

This means that 2 people can be admins, 7 can do modeling and 107 can make/run the reports because the license with higher privilege includes lower privilege too.

I agree with Lynn that whether or not a consultant is right for this depends on the skill of the consultant rather than anything else.
Most of the modelers I have seen just keep on adding things to the model and the result is a redundancy, disintegrated model with multiple packages and a heavy maintenance solution which eventually has to be re-done some time later

Mod edit - Performance Modeler is a TM1 modelling tool - Dynamic Cubes are built using Cube Designer. I updated your post to reflect this - hope you don't mind :) MF.
 

[bdbits]

I should have been clear that we are well used to having consultants around in general. You can be sure all work products will be reviewed, plenty of oversight, ensured they are following standards, etc. Good advice in any case.

I do think it is hard to find good people. I did consulting myself for 7-8 years and saw, and unfortunately still see, plenty of poorly skilled people charging too much money for what was delivered. But the good people are generally very good, and beneficial for their client. If it was up to me, I'd hire some of the people here that I know do consulting. :)

The new licensing model while simpler than the old, does have its own complexity. It gets even messier here because we have charge-backs in place built on top of the old licensing model. It makes it all rather painful for me.

I was not aware that FM no longer requires admin licensing, but I wonder how that plays out in the permissions levels actually required for it to work. I wish there was a Cognos capabilities/licensing cross-reference or better yet some new groups that correspond to the new license groups. But then I suppose we would have to upgrade to 10.2.2. And so down the rabbit hole we go. :)

I guess I need to get a more recent copy of the install guides to see what permissions might need to be granted and give it a test. All I need is more time in the day to get it done.

Thanks for the feedback.