Typical Production User Access?

[calacak]

So I am just curious what others have done in regards to user-access in their production environments?

At a few companies I've worked at, we had a base of "Power Users" that were given abilities to create their own Report Studio reports (in production). They could either save them in their 'My Folders' area or into a shareable folder under their project/team folders. In these environments, the company loved this because it quickened the time to get critical reports out, instead of sending the requirements to IT and having them do it. (Not to mention IT loved it because reports are boring and not hip ;-) )

We are moving to Cognos to where I currently work and the IT staff here has locked it down so the only ability a user has is to run reports.

It's been my personal experience that this reduces the benefit of Cognos, which empowers users to create reports from a standard approved model of data.

If we never allowed the business users power users to create their own custom reports, much of what they do would never make it into Cognos, since it typically takes weeks of effort for IT to build, qa, promote a single report, so why would they bother?

So I am curious to what others have done in their environments? Which method should be considered the "preferred" way of doing it?

-Cal

[CognosPolzovatel]

Hello Cal:

I can't say as to "what is the preferred method," however, I can share with our experience. Specifically, I work for the IT department. As a result, I can share that I like what Cognos has provided us with. Throughout the years, as we have moved to Cognos, we have seen ourselves creating less and less reports. Packages were created for our report power users and these functional users create their own reports.

I agree that buying Cognos just for Consumers may not be utilizing the full product. However, allowing users to create their own reports has a lot of considerations and analysis:
It is important to create well-designed packages
It is important to train the Cognos users in using the packages and understanding the data (so false assumptions aren't made)
etc.

Just my quick two-cents.

[calacak]

Thanks for the response, it's good to hear others think the same way :-)

[swordfish]

In my experience -

If the users have advanced knowledge about the data they are querying plus some training in cognos RS, then its definetly the best approach to save $$, and hrs in the long run.  Also not having sufficient knowledge results in more work for the IT because if something goes wrong, it will eventually come back as a SEV1 or SEV2 ticket to the IT.

If i can make decisions on this for my company, I would give them QS access and not take ownership of their problems.

RS has too many options to explore (for the user) and could result in some really wrong queries.

[almeids]

Man, Calacak and CP, you guys are living the dream.
Once we had a vision of enlightened users using the tools - at least CQ originally and later QS.  We even trained them.  Then the most powerful of the power users created their query.  Their one query.  Which everyone took a copy of and put in their personal folder and used happily ever after with their filter.  Their one filter (each).
Now I don't personally subscribe to the users-as-sheep theory, but you have to admit the anecdotal evidence suggests something seriously bovine here.
So, we've since discontinued use of QS in favor of heavily tweakable (via many prompts, most preset to default values) interactive RS reports provided by us (IT).
And BTW, our reports are anything but boring and unhip...

[rockytopmark]

I second Almeid's approach/scenario.