COGNOS ADMINISTRATOR

Job Title : COGNOS ADMINISTRATOR

Location : 2 Montgomery Street, Jersey City, New Jersey

Job Type : Contract

Duration : 2+ Years

Work schedule : Normal business hours Monday-Friday 8-5

Pay Rate : $60 to $70 per hour

DESCRIPTION OF WORK (SCOPE OF WORK)

ERAD currently hosts Cognos and Microsoft Power Platform technologies to provide data, reporting and application development to various departments in an Agency. It is anticipated that this platform will be exploited to a much greater extent in the near future to address all aspects of corporate reporting needs and application development which enables the organization to make decisions that achieve better outcomes, flexible deployment options, and to enable to easily scale analytics to meet changing business needs.

The successful candidate may work independently as well as with both consultant and staff resources of different units and departments throughout the Agency under the direction of project manager to deliver work projects including but not limited to:

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES:

• New development: Working with PA technical manager, responsible for understanding and documenting business requirements, providing project plans for new implementation, develop, test and deploy solutions to prod environment following PA processes for tracking user requirements, project development status and testing and deploying solutions following change/release management process.
• Systems Testing and Deployment – Responsible for unit and system integration testing, coordinating with business users for user acceptance testing and getting sign off from business users to implement solutions in the production for any new enhancements or development following PA’s change/release management process.
• Systems Support – Provide maintenance, enhancements and support of platform making sure the stability of applications is maintained by resolving any data issues, user help tickets in timely manner and provide on-call availability for off-hour problem resolution.
• Environment Support - Maintenance of Non-prod and Prod Cognos environments making sure the stability of these environments is always maintained by applying any required patching and upgrades as required.
• System administration - Provide system administration for installation and configurations of different components of Cognos platform, upgrades and responsible to maintain and establish user accounts, security profiles, controlling access to applications and reports following the process.
• Troubleshooting and Problem Management and Resolution - Logging, documenting, tracking and resolving system problems while ensuring ongoing data integrity with any and all interfaces and/or systems.
• Disaster Recovery Support – Defining, in conjunction with the Port Authority, the scope of periodic disaster recovery tests. Coordinating with other Port Authority staff and third parties to ensure all required tasks are covered for these tests.
• Documentation and Training - Responsible for providing all documentation needed for the continued operation and management of the system and for any new implementations that is accurate and available and in compliance with PA Standards. Provide training to end users on any new functionality of the application or platform by providing user guides.

MINIMUM EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS:

• Minimum 10 years of experience in understanding business requirements and implementation of Cognos environments with strong administration skills.
• Strong expertise with Cognos Administration, installation, configuration and security of Cognos software (TM1 and BI products), troubleshooting, tuning & disaster recovery with version 11.2 or higher.
• Experience with Cognos modelling and report development is preferred.
• Good understanding of Data warehouse concepts and advanced knowledge of using database query language (SQL) is required.
• Experience working with developers and other IT Operations personnel to analyze Cognos logs, system/server logs and troubleshoot issues.
• Experience in Implementing Cognos best practices for performance optimization, architecture, turning, monitoring.
• Experience in Setting up Cognos environments and monitoring system/server metrics.
• Experience in handling planned/unplanned outages, applying fix packs, and upgrades.
• Experience in designing and setting up Cognos Security for both TM1 and BI users.
• Knowledge of Windows system administration and understanding of Networking, firewalls, ports, certificates, and general system security concepts.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science/engineering or related fields.
• Any certification in related technologies is preferred.