What Cognos or TM1 Licences Do You Need? 

Whenever we see a new client one of the first things we need to do is get an understand their needs. Part of that discussion will invariably involve learning about what licences they either already have or will need in the future. This post is about the sort of things that we ask when having that discussion. These questions help guide us to make the right recommendations to them about what Cognos or TM1 licences are most appropriate for their organisation.

Information We Seek

Here’s a set of subjects that we like to try and get an understanding on that relate primarily to licencing of Cognos and TM1 (obviously we don’t sit there and interview them, but this is the gist of the questions).

1. Is budgeting, planning or forecasting needed.
2. If planning is needed, where will users be located.
3. Do they want planners to have intranet or excel access or a mixture of both.
4. Is the collection of information from users, like analysis of variances, important.
5. Are dynamically updating Excel based reports needed.
6. Are complex business rule based calculations used in the reports or analysis.
7. Do users want to consume information using a mobile device, like an iPad.
8. What sort of visualisations are needed (if any).
9. Do they need dashboards.
10. Are there users who just need to run reports and only answer prompts.
11. Do some users just want to receive reports as PDF’s in their inbox.
12. Are some of the more analytical people in the organisation likely to want to slice and dice, to drill down and create their own analyses.
13. Is there any need for predictive analytics or modelling.
14. Is there a preference for on premise or cloud based hosting.

For all of these questions we will also gain an understanding of how many users there are for each type of function and how those numbers are likely to change.

Then we can then pull together what and how many Cognos and/or TM1 licences are needed – including both server and user licencing.