Impromptu
Cognos Analytics 12
820 reports, rebuilt.
We moved a large estate of legacy IBM Impromptu reports, container reports included, onto IBM Cognos Analytics 12. Every business rule, calculation and prompt came across, and every report was checked against its Impromptu original before it went to testing.
In brief: Codenatives migrated 820 legacy IBM Impromptu reports, including container reports, to IBM Cognos Analytics 12. Reports were rebuilt in Cognos Report Studio with business logic, calculations and prompts preserved, redesigned to client templates, performance-tuned, and reconciled one by one against their Impromptu originals before testing and UAT.
Retire Impromptu without losing a single business rule.
Impromptu had been running the business's reporting for years. Its reports held business logic, calculations and prompt behaviour that people relied on every day. The task was to rebuild them in IBM Cognos Analytics 12 so that business users got the same numbers, in a cleaner, client-standard format, on a platform that is still supported.
Business logic
The rules built into each report, carried over exactly.
Calculations
Derived fields and totals rebuilt to return the same values.
Prompts & filters
Users pick parameters the same way and get the same subsets back.
Grouping & sorting
Rows come back in the same groups and in the same order.
Layouts
Pages, headers and footers redone to the client's templates.
Data accuracy
Output reconciled against the legacy report, every time.
From .imr to Cognos 12 in nine steps
Every report went through the same nine stages. That kept quality consistent across all 820 of them. Select a stage to see what happens there.
Stages advance on their own until you pick one.
Same numbers, checked against the source.
A migrated report is finished only when its output matches the Impromptu report it replaces. Each report went through this quality loop before business users saw it:
- Reconcile Cognos 12 output against the corresponding legacy Impromptu report.
- Resolve data discrepancies, calculation and prompt issues, and formatting differences.
- Hand over to the testing team for functional and data validation.
- Fix & retest the defects testing finds, then send the reports back for retesting.
- Support UAT and deal with anything business users raise before deployment.
| Check | Impromptu | Cognos 12 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Row count | source run | migrated run | Pending |
| Column totals | source run | migrated run | Pending |
| Calculated fields | legacy logic | CA12 expressions | Pending |
| Prompt behaviour | legacy prompts | CA12 prompts | Pending |
| Grouping & sort | legacy order | CA12 order | Pending |
| Layout & formatting | legacy layout | client template | Pending |
Where we made slow reports fast
When a migrated report was slow or returned the wrong data, we traced the cause through five parts of the report, starting with the SQL that Cognos generates.
Generated SQL
Read the SQL Cognos generates to find extra work, missing predicates and costly patterns.
Filters
Apply filters as early as possible so the database, not the report, does the narrowing.
Joins
Check join paths and cardinality so rows aren't duplicated and scans stay small.
Calculations
Move heavy calculations to the right place so they don't slow rendering down.
Report design
Simplify query structure and layout so the report does no more than it needs to.
Impromptu is replaced by a Cognos Analytics 12 report estate that is accurate, validated, optimized and built to the client's standards, and ready for business-user acceptance and deployment.
Impromptu to Cognos Analytics 12, answered
What we worked with
Data Analytics & BI
BI strategy, Cognos migration and upgrades, Analytics CoE setup and managed reporting.
Cognos to Qlik Migration
140 complex Cognos reports and dashboards moved to QlikView/QlikSense for a major global bank.
Power BI Dashboard Suite
A Power BI accounting dashboard on SQL Server tracking AR, revenue, billings and WIP ageing.
Still running Impromptu
or an older Cognos? ↗
Let's plan your move to Cognos Analytics 12.
