Veteran Affairs offers Cognos a second chance

The Department of Veteran Affairs has awarded a tender to Kaz Computer Services for the roll-out of a new Cognos Business Intelligence system, despite being far from satisfied with an older Cognos-based solution it is looking to replace.

The Department, which annually provides AU$10 billion of services to 585,000 survivors of wars and peacetime conflicts, released a tender for a new Business Intelligence system in November 2006 after a series of complications with its existing system.

Gary Sutton, director of the departmental management information systems project at the Department of Veteran Affairs, said the servers deployed for the DVA's existing Cognos 7.3-based solution were not powerful enough to run the complex software.

Equally, the version of Cognos deployed was not flexible enough to cope with the department's desire to migrate from Windows-based clients to Citrix Metaframe (thin-client solution) for the 600-odd staff that use the solution.

"Audit locks were difficult to deal with," Sutton said. "And Powerplay for Web [Cognos' reporting tool] didn't have enough functionality or enough interoperability."

Sutton said the main pain points of the old system were "not about the tool so much as how we deployed the tool".

Data was stored in departmental information silos, Sutton said, which "doesn't respond well to changes in Government policy".

The case for investing in a new solution was based on a desire to "move from a reliance on IT to case of business looking after its own BI requirements".

The department was required under Government procurement laws to market test for a change in system.

As part of the tender, the department released a long list of mandatory requirements. The winning solution had to be compatible, for example, with the hardware, software and data integration technologies the department was already using.

There was a mandatory requirement for compatibility with the department's IBM servers, as well as for a zero-footprint client to suit its Metaframe deployment.

The winning tender, by Kaz, put forward the Cognos 8.2 solution. The subsequent software licensing agreement will last for three years, with an option to extend to five years.

Sutton said DVA was attracted to Cognos' flexible licensing and new search capabilities.

The department also purchased new IBM AIX P5 servers to cope with the additional computational requirements, and upgraded their IBM DB2 database to the Data Warehouse Edition.

The new software has been loaded onto the department's servers, and DVA staff are now in training with a view to having all users migrated across by June 2008.