How a US college transformed its most vital data assets from Discoverer into actionable and meaningful insights in Cognos.
Oracle Discoverer has been the reporting tool of choice for many years for Oracle e-Business users due to its intuitiveness, ease of use, and most notably, minimal cost. As a result, many organizations have continued to make substantial investments in Discoverer to provide their decision support. Now, with Oracle no longer supporting Discoverer, users are challenged with finding a new Business Intelligence reporting tool to fill this gap.
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A US College Migrates from Discoverer to Cognos
Business Context
A nationally recognized, private college was in the process of moving to university status. Their journey to becoming a university was reinforced by their diverse portfolio of undergraduate and graduate programs, in addition to master's and doctoral programs.
New Data Challenges
Moving to university status would create new data challenges as well as opportunities. At the time, the school does most of its reporting through the unsupported Oracle Discoverer tool.
As part of an ongoing, strategic plan to develop its business analytics reporting capabilities, all of the school's reporting needed to be transitioned to the IBM Cognos platform. This included the transformation of its most vital data assets from reports built in Oracle Discoverer — (Professor Information, Student Attendance, Academic Results, Student Details) — into actionable and meaningful insights that could be tracked more diligently in Cognos.
Why Cognos?
Cognos was selected based on its wider array of features and more flexible reporting environment (compared to Discoverer). Plus, the tool had already been installed and used in other departments across campus, which made it easier to roll out.
Migration Process
Project Scope — Extract and migrate all reports from Oracle Discoverer to Cognos
ennVee is no stranger to the Oracle Discoverer migration process, specifically within the higher education space.
We conducted an assessment of the current reports environment to identify the total number of Discoverer reports, workbooks, and worksheets. After the school scrubbed the list for duplicates and obsolete reports, we were tasked with extracting and migrating the remainder of the reports from Discoverer to Cognos.
Both the assessment and extraction phases were automated using our ennSight tool.
Discoverer of Cognos migration benefits
- Automating the extraction process helped the college transition it's reporting to Cognos in eight weeks and under budget.
- The college now has the ability to access its most frequently used reports through a significantly improved GUI (Graphical User Interface) and visual environment a la Cognos.
Read the full case study:
Check out our other blog posts about Oracle Discoverer migrations for case studies and tips.
