Performance Management with Cognos 10

Performance Management is a journey

A journey that is not completed overnight or even in the short term. With this viewpoint a team can move forward in increments and make better progress with better results that trying to eat the elephant all in one bite. Every decision-making cycle depends on finding the answers to three core questions: How are we doing? Why? What should we be doing? By integrating information, technology, and people, your decision-makers can become performance managers. Performance managers look at metrics, plans, and reports in their functional area to make the best possible decisions. In this way, your good decisions cause other good decisions. The end result is better alignment, accountability, and performance. (Source: IBM)

You must integrate functionality

To ensure consistency in answering these fundamental performance questions, you must integrate functionality not just within each one, but across them all. Knowing what happened without finding out why is of little use. Knowing why something happened but being unable to plan and make the necessary changes is also of limited value. Furthermore, this integrated functionality must be seamless across the full network of performance managers, whether within a department or across several. In this sense, the new paradigm today is the platform. Just as the questions are connected, the answers must be based on a common understanding of metrics, data dimensions, and data definitions, as well as a shared view of the organization. Drawing answers from disconnected sources obscures the organization’s performance and hampers decision-making. (Source: The Performance Manager Book)

Real value means providing a seamless way for decision-makers to move among these fundamental questions. The integrated technology platform is vital to connect people throughout the system to shared information. Its core attributes include the ability to:

• Integrate data from a variety of data sources
• Supply consistent information across the enterprise by deploying a single query engine
• Restrict information to the right people
• Package and define the information in business terms

Cognos performance management components include:

Reporting and Dashboards. Users can create, mod- ify, and distribute any report the company requires—invoices, statements, weekly sales and inventory reports, from any data source for consistent fact-based decision-making. With dashboards can view and analyze complex data in intuitive graphical formats, including dashboard layouts, geographical maps, pie or bar graphs, or 3D graphs.

Analysis and ad-hoc query. Online analytical pro- cessing (OLAP) means users can explore large vol- umes of summarized data in a variety of formats with industry-leading response times, drilling through to the details they need.

Enterprise Planning. Cognos software provides users with an integrated, best-in-class solution for planning, budgeting, forecasting, modeling, consol- idation, and financial reporting.

Scorecarding. Scorecards deliver measurable met- rics that let users know immediately where they stand, enabling them to manage their performance.

Event detection. Time-critical business intelligence is automatically delivered to decision-makers through e-mail and wireless technologies, allowing them to focus quickly on what needs immediate attention.

Here is a great video on the product vision of Cognos 10