The Low Cost Solution for IBM Cognos Governance, Risk and Compliance
US Patent 7,945,589
In the past few years, transparency regulations legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) have renewed the emphasis on internal controls and therefore has required organizations to invest substantial time and resources in compliance. These regulations stipulate that newly designed systems having a significant financial impact must have internal controls designed, documented and tested.
Compliance doesn’t stop with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other transactional, data collection systems, but for most organizations, extends into their IBM Cognos performance management environments.
The Impact on Cognos Environments
As Authors create content within an IBM Cognos environment, the development process is often iterative. Throughout the lifecycle of this content (inception through completion), there are often numerous modifications made along the way. This could be due to peer review, checkpoints in the development process, incremental changes, saving prior to testing a change, etc.
Typically, the only method of reverting back to, or recovering from, a previously saved artifact is to modify the name upon each save. Rather than saving in place of the current artifact when changes are made (thus causing the artifact to be replaced with the modified one), users can save with a different name (i.e. v1, v2, etc.).
In addition, content is not easily protected during the development cycle, so multiple Authors can inadvertently modify the same content without each other knowing it.
The Solution
Well now there's a better way; a mechanism for placing tight controls and workflow around an IBM Cognos performance management environment. This integrated, real-time, user-driven method for capturing, maintaining and managing previous versions of IBM Cognos content was built out of many years of experience and insight into validated and non-validated environments. In addition to the consistent preservation of content (including comparison, reversion, auditing and more) ensuring record keeping and documentation of any and all changes are satisfied in an automated manner, content locking and usage monitoring are built in as well.
And best of all, the solution is completely scalable and transparent to users.
Through strong partnership with IBM Cognos, BSP Software has released Integrated Version Control® to simplify and streamline the process of continuously preserving authored content in the event changes need to be audited or the information needs to be recovered. IVC’s innovative approach to integrating directly within the IBM Cognos 8 interface allows the product to appear and behave as if it were part of the core IBM Cognos 8 product suite. IVC’s version control process is intuitive and requires little or no training for consumers.
IVC is the only real-time, transparent and truly integrated versioning and governance, risk and compliance solution for IBM Cognos.
Features of the solution include:
- Direct integration into IBM Cognos 8 BI Studios and IBM Cognos Connection.
- Versioned content is secured by existing IBM Cognos 8 security. Consumers must have access to the report to see previous versions.
- Prior versions are archived real-time as Authors save existing content within any supported Studio, regardless of where they store the current version (Public or My Folders).
- Prior versions are accessed through the applicable Studio or through IBM Cognos Connection.
- Recovery of versioned specifications is done with the click of a button.
- Security integration within Cognos Capabilities.
- Enable and disable IVC features through the IBM Cognos secured functions and features.
- IVC Administration console integrated directly within Cognos Administration.
- Integrated Change Management with elaborate workflow.
- Report locking capabilities to prevent multiple Authors from simultaneous development.
- Optional check-in and check-out capabilities providing tight process and controls over the development process.
- Support for an unlimited number of previous versions to be stored and recovered.
- Preview any two versions side by side visually to compare visual differences.
- Preview any two versions side by side programmatically (XML specification comparison) to compare syntax differences.
- Supports both Public and Personal (My Folders) authored content.
- Promote reports between development, test and production environments.
- Real-time studio monitoring to determine what users are currently editing which reports in a given studio.
- Broadcast messaging to users that are currently working in any studio information such as, “The server is going to be rebooted. Please save your work and exit.”
IVC’s new change management capability is an extension to Integrated Version Control designed for companies that desire workflow and process around their development efforts. With Change Management, all public content is required to be checked out prior to making modifications. Upon Checkout, the public report becomes locked preventing other users from modifying the content. Within the checked out copy, Authors can make any number of modifications, saving versions each time they save the content. Once they are satisfied with the changes, the Author can check in the report, unlocking the public version and replacing it with the updated copy.
Integrated Version Control satisfies the internal control requirements placed on many organizations throughout design documentation and testing process. Because the product is entirely automated and transparent, very little time or resources are expended ensuring complete compliance.
To use Integrated Version Control, you must have:
- Proper user permissions to install software on the Cognos 8 Gateway and Dispatcher Server(s)
- IBM Cognos 8.0 and higher
Integrated Version Control can be demonstrated onsite or via a web meeting. To arrange a product demonstration, please contact us.
