Cognos is a data reporting tool that will be used to create day to day reports or reports for larger business-scale decisions. Examples of reports that can be pulled are: 

• How many students are in each class, or what students applied to my program and plan? 
• When students take certain classes their semester GPA is lower, what type of support can we provide students in these classes? 
• We are consistently recruiting students from certain areas, but missing other areas; what can we do differently to draw in students from those lower represented areas?

Who Can Access Cognos? 

To gain Access to Cognos, review the article Requesting Access to Cognos 

Training 

Several Cognos trainings are available to new and existing users.

• See Cognos Training for a complete list of topics. 
• See Cognos Training Videos to learn or review Cognos topics.
• Go to the Cognos Training website to sign up for in-person Cognos training.

General Information 

• Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA) advise that Cognos should be accessed using Google Chrome only. Other browsers experience issues displaying and downloading reports and should not be used. 
• Off-campus users will need a VPN connection. For more information on how to connect to campus through VPN review the article VPN. 
• Visit the Enterprise Data & Analytics website for the latest known issues or alerts under Cognos Alerts on the EDA Home tab. 
  

Cognos Terminology 

• Institutional Data Warehouse (IDW) – Sits on top of the student information data resources to collect relevant data needed for reports. 
• Packages – a group of similar data items; reports are built using packages; users can view and modify included reports as well as create their own using data included in the package. 
  

Types of Reports 

• Standard Report – A simple list report. 
• Interactive Report – A simple list report that offers a limited number of interactive features when you are in the HTML view of the report within Cognos. 
• Dashboard – Interactive and responsive to the selections that users make.

For more information on Cognos Reports and how to export the data, see Reports Available in Cognos. 

How to Get Help

Technical assistance is available through the Technology Support Center at (309) 438-4357, by email at SupportCenter@IllinoisState.edu, or by Live Chat at Help.IllinoisState.edu.