Cognos to Power BI Migration: 12 Week Assessment and Implementation

Businesses nowadays are looking to switch from Cognos to Power BI to enhance their data visulaization capabilities, for advanced analytics and seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. Power BI makes a better choice than Cognos because of the following factors:

1. Its user-friendly interface with intuitive drag and drop functionality
2. Its flexible pricing structure
3. Advanced analytics capabilities, such as data modeling, DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) formulas, and integration with Azure Machine Learning.

But the migration comes with its own share of challenges: There are different file systems and models between Cognos and Power BI; different modules/departments within an organization may be using different data models( cubes, framework manager and data modules); transformation of the custom calculations in Cognos which are SQL based to DAX based expressions in Power BI

Sigmoid's Capabilities:

With its migration accelerators and end-to-end planning, Sigmoid ensures a successful and seamless migration, along with automating the creation of consistent, accurate and highly interactive Power BI reports. Also with its extensive experience on the Azure stack, Sigmoid focuses on the integration of Power BI with other Azure services such as Microsoft Purview, Azure ML and Azure Cognitive Services as well, adhering to Microsoft's Well Architected Framework.

Sigmoid makes use of the following in-house developed accelerators:

1. Cognos Report Metadata Extractor & Cognos Data Model Extractor
2. Business layer Creator
3. Power BI Formatting and Standardization Accelerator

The steps involved in the migration procedure:

1. Discovery & Plan - Creating a report inventory, categorizing on the basis of complexity, conducting workshops for prioritizing the reports, finalizing scope and developing a detailed project plan
2. Design & Build - Extracting metadata from Cubes/Framework Managers and reports, creating semantic layer, data connection to Power BI, model creation, business logic transformation into DAX, report validation and establishing a data quality framework
3. Test - Developing test scenarios and test cases, conducting system integration tests, ensuring performace baseline for the models and dashboards, conducting user acceptance tests
4. Deploy & Support - Formulating the deployment plan, performing change management, monitoring dashboards and optimizing performance if needed; providing user demos

Benefits realized by employing the above:

1. Time Saving - Our accelerators enable us to speed up timelines by up to 50-60%
2. Significant reduction in Human error while extracting Model data and metadata
3. Report reconciliation - Combining reports with same structure into a single dashboard
4. Application of GenAI to convert calculations into DAX queries
5. Automated testing and validation
6. Automated formatting and design implementation on dashboards

Begin your succesful journey to this migration with Sigmoid as your chosen partner and experience the value of migrating from Cognos to Power BI