The Executive Dashboard 2010

This is the Executive Dashboard as presented at IBM Rational Innovate 2010. This looks to be quite a bit more sophisticated than last year.

IBM Rational Insight - Various versions

List of different versions of Rational Insight and the supported product integrations the links to download pages

Rational Insight 1.0 (Released May 2009)

• Rational Team Concert
• Rational Quality Manager
• Rational ClearCase
• Rational Clearquest
• Rational Test Manager
• Rational RequisitePro
• Microsoft Project
• HP Quality Center* (Released Aug 2009)

Rational Insight 1.0.0.1 (Released Sept 2009)

• Rational Quality Manager 1.0.1.1
• Rational Quality Manager 2.0
• Rational Team Concert 1.0
• Rational Team Concert 2.0

Rational Insight 1.0.0.2 (Released Dec 2009)

• Rational Project Conductor 1.0
• Rational DOORS 9.2.0.1.
• Licensing enforcement, specific license keys for Rational Insight are now required

Reporting : Some common myths and misconceptions

Reporting is same as charting
Most people tend to think that reporting is as simple as creating a chart. Reporting involves storing, retrieving, aggregating data in a manner to assist in creating cool charts quickly. Charting is just a small part of reporting, once you have the required data in a simple table then you can create a nice looking chart using all the nice colors etc. Note the key requirement for charting - 'once you have the required data'.

Anyone should be able to create reports
Yeah right. Any Tom Dick and Harry just cannot create reports, any TD&H should be able to create charts but not reports. Only a programmer knows how to deal with tonnes of data, how to store it efficiently, how to retrieve it efficiently, the relationships between entities etc. Any report worth having will be complex enough that only a programmer will be able to create it.

This report can be created in a day
Yeah right again... Creating reports is a time consuming job. If too much data is involved you want to store precomputed values in a data warehouse, if latest information is crucial then report should use operational data store, a user needs to be able to drill down and drill up in a report and most importantly the colors in the chart need to look perfect. All this can be 'easily' accomplished in a day!

Every report can run in 1 sec
This one is hilarious, you have millions of records in your DB and you expect the report to run in 1 sec. Reports based on data warehouse (pre-computed results) can be made to run very very fast, but sometimes the data is missing in the data warehouse and you need to create some custom reports from Operational data store, now these reports are going to be slow. Even data warehouse reports can take some time to run, depending upon how much data is there and what all needs to be aggregated. Sometime reports can take hours to run, schedule these overnight (if needed) and stop cribbing.

To be honest most people take reports for granted, I mean they just expect all sorts of good reports to be there, and they don't really appreciate the effort gone behind creating all those cool reports. The truth is : any report worth having is quite complex!

Rational Insight on the IBM Developer Cloud

Demo of the usage of Rational Insight on the IBM Developer Cloud



Why IBM Developer Cloud ?
The cloud saves costs in aquiring, installing, configuring and managing software

Rational's new project management solution

IBM Rational Focal Point for Project Management is a project and resource management system optimized for software and systems delivery. It allows managing activities such as Gantt charting and resource management. Focal Point manages day-to-day tasks while Rational Insight offers higher level metrics, they really work hand in hand.

Focal Point for Project Management is built on Jazz. But what does it mean to be “built on Jazz”?

• The tasks developers see in their change management (CM) system are the same as the tasks the project managers see in the work breakdown structure (WBS)
• Project managers assign tasks in the WBS and developers see their assignments in their CM system
• Developers report their status in the CM system and project managers see that status in the WBS

It’s the same artifact – regardless of where it is visible in the system!

Here is a quick overview of Rational's new project management solution by Neil Leblanc, product manager at Rational. More information is also available on Jazz Team Blog.



Learn more about 'IBM Rational Focal Point for Project Management' from the official announcement page. Trial download is available as part of Rational Early Access Preview on Jazz.net

Focal Point for Project Management is also hosted on Jazz.net. Get the overview, features and release plan. ( Note : You will have to register on jazz.net to have a look at the release plan).

IBM Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) - Getting started

Last month, IBM Rational announced their Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) offering, described in the IBM’s oficial news release. MCIF encapsulates 25 years of experience helping teams incrementally improve their practice maturity to deliver business results.

Learn more about MCIF.
Here is a short video on MCIF from Per Kroll, chief architect at IBM.



There is also a white paper on MCIF by Per Kroll and Murray Cantor.

Abstract : "In this paper, we describe how to govern the software and system delivery function to ensure favorable ROI by introducing a control framework that enables reasoning about those practices that work and those that don’t. Using this framework permits us to effectively manage risk or innovation and diseconomy of scale, and to understand the effectiveness of difference development models."

The paper also discusses an MCIF measurement solution implemented at IBM Rational using IBM Rational Insight - the 'Executive Dashboard'.

Also watch the presentation by Eric Larsen (Product Manager, Rational Insight) and Per Kroll (Chief Solution Arhitect, MCIF) on Make Better Decisions by Overcoming Information Blind Spots. This presentation talks about where how Rational Insight is an essential part of MCIF.

IBM Rational Software Conference 2009: Process, Project and Portfolio Management Track Keynote. This keynote talks about how Rational Insight and MCIF are part of the whole Rational solutions story

IBM Rational Open House

Today a bunch of us at IBM Rational Software lab at Bangalore conducted this 'Rational Open House' event. It was done at 3 places in Bangalore (EGL Pyramid, EGL Rational Lab, ISL Manyata) and 1 place in Gurgaon (ISL Gurgaon). The idea behind the event was to let people in the lab know what we do in Rational, create a buzz about Rational tools and jazz.net, and also get some customers, after all money is an important thing :).

I was showcasing Rational Insight at EGL Pyramid along with few other folks who were showcasing other Rational products, including the 'rock star' Rational Team Concert. I say rock star because everyone who came wanted to know about it, and fell in love with it after seeing it. The story was the same at EGL Rational Lab and ISL Manyata. RTC was hogging all the limelight, rightly so, as its a great product.

There was quite a bit of interest in Rational Insight. Everyone who came was impressed by what she/he saw. The ability to summarize organization wide information in a dashboard, the ability to drill down to the exact cause of a problem and the ability to design a report in like 15 seconds really impressed people. Also Cognos has been a leader in BI space for a long time, so even though this is Insight's first release the underlying cognos infrastructure helps in gaining user confidence.

A few words about Jazz.net and RTC before I close. Jazz.net is the place where anyone can see what we are doing in the Rational labs, quite a few products are hosted there. Anyone can register and see all the plans and workitems for these products. This is not open source (nothing is free), though some source code is available for download. This is an Open Commercial way of software development. Our development process is open, which means our customers can see what is going on, they can provide feedback/requirements/comments early in the development process. Open development is one of the main reasons why open source projects do well. But IBM did not want Jazz platform and products on top of it to be open source like Eclipse.

According to me Open Commercial should be model for software development everywhere. After all money has to be made and salaries have to be paid, so you cant make everything open source. But you can make everything open, you can let your customers/users see what is going on, and let them interact directly with developers. Otherwise developers are hidden from customers and vice versa with layers of customer support and product managers. A direct interaction between users and developers is good for everyone. Also if you do things in open you try to do things better as everyone is watching :).

IBM Rational Insight - Getting Started

Rational Insight is an enterprise reporting and performance measurement solution. It implements standard measurements, reports, and dashboards to provide accurate insight into systems and software delivery organization.

Seeing is believing, so here is a short demo of Rational Insight.

IBM Rational Executive Dashboard



Based on Rational Insight, the Executive Dashboard is designed around business and operational objectives. It pulls live data from a variety of sources

• Rational Team Concert
• Rational Quality Manager
• Rational ClearCase
• Rational Clearquest
• Rational Test Manager
• Rational RequisitePro
• Microsoft Project

Rational Insight supports data retrieval from sources using either the REST architecture or direct database access. Hence it can support any data source that provides REST services for accessing data, or has direct database access. The above list represents the products supported out of the box.

Rational Insight is based on Cognos Business Intelligence and performance management technology. Founded in 1969, Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries. Learn more about Cognos software

• Cognos Inc
• Cognos Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management

Rational Insight consists of the following components

• IBM Cognos® Data Manager
• IBM Rational Insight data warehouse
• IBM Cognos Framework Manager
• IBM Rational Insight report server
• IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server
• IBM Rational Insight XML data configuration
• IBM Rational Insight Data Services

It also works with other Cognos components, for instance with Cognos 8 Go to deliver reports on mobile devices.

Learn more about Rational Insight architecture

• Introducing IBM Rational Insight V1.0
• Rational Insight infocenter

Rational Insight is a key part of IBM - Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF). MCIF encapsulates 25 years of experience helping teams incrementally improve their practice maturity to deliver business results. Learn more about MCIF. Here is a short video on MCIF from Per Kroll, chief architect at IBM.

Rational Insight

Here is what we have been working on....

IBM - IBM Rational Insight - Rational Insight - Software

Introducing IBM Rational Insight V1.0

Infocenter





For help on Rational Insight refer http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rentrpt/v1r0m0/index.jsp