Less Idea Focus - More Customer Focus

I want to officially complaint about the abuse of the Ideas concept within IBM and more specifically, for Cognos Analytics. While we Business Partners and our Customers are fighting every day to keep Cognos Analytics win battles versus competitors like Microsoft Power BI and Qlik, by implementing state of the art reporting environments for our clients and customers, that are reliable, correct, and swift, we keep on hitting a big fat wall when it comes to customer support and product improvements.

We have seen in the last many years a bit too much of focus by the development theme on "copycatting" the competitors. Implementing functionality just because it was released in Microsoft PowerBI, or trying to ride the AI wave. While we do applaud such investments, what we noticed - A LOT - is that apparently at IBM nobody really wants to listen to the client, listen to the business partner, and really work with them to improve the product. In the last 5 years, i have discovered several faults in the products. The average "resolve" time of these was many many.. years. Defects are always waved away as "nice to haves" and replied with "you can add a new idea". Clear useful changes, similarly, are not being developed until they are logged as an idea and being promoted here. I don't know who is reading all these ideas and who is supporting them, but for sure none of my clients comes here. They communicate with the business partners instead. Finally, even worse, when issues are logged with Cognos Support, too often the consultant there doesn't really investigate the case thoroughly. They ask too many questions, instead of thinking rationally and testing the problem themselves first quickly on their test environments.

This idea is simple: change this. Reserve time at the development teams to build on issues brought by the actual users and business partners who have a very strong knowledge on the product. Especially for the quick-wins. Improvements that take only 1-2 hours of time to develop in the product, should not be going through a lot of on-and-forth between consultant, partner, client and support. Instead, clear small defects should all be moved swiftly to development and be investigated and resolved swiftly.

Cognos Analytics is still, especially for reporting, a better tool than Microsoft PowerBI and Qlik, because they have an integrated platform with security, a framework manager that is surely better than using DAX, a built-in tool to build mini data sets and bring them together in Data Modules, a very strong automation platform (Agents) and a brilliant report builder (Reporting). I've seen companies even automate their billing process completely and win every month lots of time just by using IBM Cognos Analytics.

I hope all customers, partners, and even IBM staff will loudly applaud this "idea" and help improve customer satisfaction within IBM.