Cognos and Search

Today, Cognos announced the Cognos 8 "Go!" Search Service. It's a real breakthrough. We all use search engines and business users in large companies are becoming accustomed to using "Enterprise Search" to find documents, web content and other artifacts floating around their organization. One of the big blind spots for enterprise search has been the performance management content managed by their business intelligence and management process applications such as their business dashboards, scorecards and planning data.

It's a problematic blind spot for search because this is the content that management self-identifies as being most directly related to how they view the health of their business.

Until now.

The Cognos Search Service unlocks all of that content to be accessed using free-form searches by business users, and even passes search parameters to modify the content to tailor it to the original search. For example, a search on "revenue for SUVs in Illinois for Q3" can search for and find a revenue report for all models, filter it to Illinois and SUVs and for Q3 and offer it up as a search result, mixed with the rest. The user doesn't know any of this has happened. It's just search.

More importantly, this can relate the management process content (like reports and scorecards) with other search results, driving the long-awaited convergence of structured data content and unstructured information, using the most ubiquitous method of accessing information: search.

Just to be clear. The Cognos Search Service is real search for BI information. It's not a text-based sleight of hand or pre-configured "English-like" query metaphor, that other vendors may trumpet in its wake.

This is big. Stay tuned.