Historically, the emphasis has been on leveraging trusted information to understand and communicate the state of the business (hindsight), and helping to anticipate where the business is going (foresight). That’s no longer enough. In light of today’s multi-faceted challenges, CFOs must help uncover hidden opportunities and risks. Over 80% of Finance teams expect to use [...]
Update your forecasts when you want to Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to update your forecasts on a quarterly basis rather than annually? Budgeting, planning and forecasting has typically been an annual process because of the time, effort and money involved. Collecting data from multiple sources, consolidating it, checking it, refining it, [...]
Business Analytics for the Office of Finance The vast majority of CFO’s are now taking a more prominent role in decision-making, beyond the traditional role of finance. The Office of Finance needs access to tools and best practices that allows them to be ready for the challenge. These leaders need to know where their organization [...]
Overview Some Clarity implementations use Microsoft Analysis Services as the OLAP engine. For those implementations, there are some system settings we can enable to speed things up. These should only be enabled in a production environment. Development environments where objects are changing should not have any caching or compression enabled. Implementing Compression in Analysis [...]
Overview Clarity is a web application, so web server compression can speed things up a bit for end users. By enabling web server compression, Internet Information Server (IIS) compresses all files sent to the client. If there are folks connecting on slow connections, this can really help. This is something that needs some baseline [...]
Building reports in ClarityStudio can be a bit challenging without some guidance. To help new folks along, we have developed a series of Youtube videos to walk you through the process of developing a complex report. This particular report that we build together is a validation report to compare two cubes. This is a very [...]
Virtualize Clarity? Recently, I worked with a client whose IT department was going through the process of virtualizing physical servers into the cloud. For them, moving to the cloud would reduce their maintenance effort, and provide a safe off-site location for all their data. Their IBM Clarity servers were physical boxes located in their office [...]
What Does This Do? Recently, a client was trying to figure out why a template wasn't working and it came down to just one checkbox, the Only Send Changed Rows checkbox. By default, this is checked when you start building a template, but what does it mean, and why do I care? If we are [...]
Any database application should be able to deal with data growth. As an application is used, data is created and evolves. With a corporate performance management tool, data can nicely sliced by a (Scenario, Year) combination. For example (Actual, 2004) would be the actual transactions that happened in 2004. (Budget, 2006) would be the approved [...]
If you ever ask IBM Support or a consultant for help with Clarity, they will probably ask you, "What version of Clarity are you using?". This is meant to be a simple question, but for folks that don't know how to find the version, it can be a bit confusing. Here are some simple ways [...]
