Cognos Forum 2007 Key Learnings

Cognos Forum 2007 In Brief

Over 3000 customers from around the world, biggest Forum ever!

More and more organizations actively on their performance management journey…

…Or as some call it, their “performance management exploration”, as they constantly discover new destinations

Big thought

Performance Management Framework—look at PM by department, by information sweetspots

New tech

Cognos Go! Mobile (BI on BlackBerry®)

Cognos Now! operational BI & dashboards

Cognos 8 BI and Planning, solid new versions

Forum Mainstage

Rob Ashe (Cognos CEO): Day 1

Les Rechan (Cognos COO) & award-winning performance management customers: Day 2

Steve Farber on Extreme Leadership: Day 3

Mainstage Day 1See How: The Cognos Vision, Direction, and Roadmap

15-year journey to performance management:

Started with BI; Office of Finance required, plus best practices & applications

Now, PM is the buzz…everywhere

Cognos is 100% focused on performance management

Innovation fuels our performance management leadership:

Innovation responds to customers. What do customers want?

Visibility and compliance; Information now; Business impact

Cognos delivers the performance management framework:

You define your starting point: BI in sales; Planning in Finance; standardizing across departments with BI

Learn more: Cognos Performance Management Framework

Mainstage Day 2Know How: Solutions for Success with Cognos

Key People Areas: user adoption, executive sponsorship, business & IT alignment, mapping skill sets to plan

Key Process Areas: clear success metrics, BICCs for “factory capability,” big-picture thinking, and better practices

Cognos Performance Solution: products, PM framework, best practices & blueprints, partners, services

Example: Media/communication company. Grew revenues by 11% last quarter. Revenue/customer up 5%. High customer satisfaction

CEO focused on data-driven decisions

Leveraged: Cognos 8 BI, Innovation Center, capital planning & call center blueprints, global services & support

Standardized on Cognos, created executive business portal

Now have better visibility into business, higher quality data, shorter cycle times, and leveraging Teradata, SAP, and Oracle

Performance Leadership Awards

Leadership in Technology: Impact Through Technical Innovation

The Boeing Company

Leadership in Technology: Operational Excellence

Freightliner LLC

Leadership in the Office of Finance: Executive Excellence

Folksam Insurance Group

Leadership in the Office of Finance, Innovation & Best Practices

QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies

Performance Visionary Awards

BASF Corporation, Bloorview Kids’ Rehab, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, The City of Albuquerque, DIRECTV, Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Learn more: Cognos News Release

Mainstage Day 3Imagine How: Inspiration for Success (Steve Farber)

Extreme Leadership is about transformation

The foundations: No posers: co-opt others’ glory without putting anything at risk

Extreme leaders must take a “Radical LEAP”: Cultivate Love: the motivation to lead. Explains why people stick

their necks out and put things at risk

Generate Energy: comes from loving what you do

Inspire Audacity: a bold and blatant disregard for normal constraints to make positive change

Provide Proof: do what you say you will do. Leaders must be willing to scare themselves to make change. No leadership without accountability

Pursue the “OS!M (Oh, sh*t! moment): when you realize you need to stretch or grow to make change happen. Can feel like the biggest mistake of your life

Learn more: Steve Farber podcast

Forum Breakout Sessions:Performance Management technologies

What’s New in Planning 8.2

Successful Strategies for Long-Range Financial Planning

Performance Management Best Practices & Cognos BI

Best Practices: Migrating to Cognos 8 BI

Getting the Most From Report Studio

Report Makeovers: Producing Professional Reports

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile and your Wireless Workforce

Cognos Now! – New Operational BI Appliance

Linking HR to Strategy with Workforce Performance

What’s New in Planning 8.2

Cognos Planning 8.2 eliminates duplicate efforts of planning staff

With added Excel functionality and enhanced formatting features, it’s more user-friendly then ever

The newly added deployment and portability features: Export, Export Model, Import between test and production environments

Easy, wizard-driven upgrading to Planning 8.2

Direct access to all your Cognos 8 BI data (including SAP, Teradata, etc.) via Framework Manager

Learn more: Cognos 8 Planning

Successful Strategies for Long-Range Financial Planning(CBH & Resources Global Professionals)

Cognos Planning minimizes manual processes and reduces planning cycles with its flexible architecture

Kaiser Permanante (KP) uses Cognos Planning to integrate data in real-time, reducing data latency and providing transparency to its planning and forecasting operations

Customer uses role-based and regional-based reports to deliver relevant planning data to planning staff nationwide

Customer also leverages Cognos 8 BI reports and distributes critical planning intelligence via “Cognos Connection” – the report distribution platform

Learn more: Cognos 8 Planning

Performance Management Best Practices & Cognos BI (Bloorview Kid’s Rehab)

Largest rehab center in Canada for children, 900 staff

Good reporting essential in healthcare; Need now recognized

Bloorview Challenges:

Data heavy, but information poor

Departmental boundaries & lack of coordination in data

Poor end user skills. Not even great Excel users.

Keys to successful response:

Cross-discipline Decision Support Team as corporate resource

Financial data, yes, but Healthcare info too!

Example:

Scorecard shows outpatients trending down…can follow metric maps to see why; Before, had to visit each clinical area to find out why—More efficiency, more control, better health care

Best Practices: Migrating to Cognos 8 BI(BC Lottery Commission)

Leverage Cognos Consulting for planning your migration and involve them at checkpoints

Train your IT people before the project on both Series 7 technology and Cognos 8 BI

Implement content freezes for easier migration

Use a parallel environment for quality assurance

Empower IT to plan and strategize the migration

Provide training for power users after deployment

Learn more: Cognos Global Customer Services

Getting the Most From Report Studio(American International Group)

How to customize and extend Cognos with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create:

Fixed Column Headers—allowing users to scroll through large rows on a single page and maintain their understanding of data

Dynamic Column Selector—giving users the ability to actively view or hide information

Null Column Suppression—using simple HTML, JavaScript, and the database length function to suppress rows with no information

Hierarchical Expand/Collapse Tree—using simple coding along with the “Connect By” clause to allow users to navigate through hierarchical data in a user-friendly manner

Download the actual code used at the Cognos Forum Attendees Resource Center

Learn more: Cognos Global Customer Services

Report Makeovers: Producing Professional Reports

Building professional reports means addressing: Information – need IT, Database administrators disciplines

Presentation – need communications, graphic design disciplines

Implementation – need report authoring discipline

Information: Reports must lead users to a decision and/or action

Each report should provide at least 1 comparison and 1 summary.

Presentation: The message is in the data. Keep the design simple; no distractions

Use templates, fonts, and a focal point to establish a visual hierarchy

Implementation: Use layout components within Cognos 8 BI to ensure consistent use of

headers, sub-heads, footers, fonts, and other visual items

Learn more: Data Visualization White Papers

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile and your Wireless Workforce

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile provides critical BI information not only to executives but also operational staff such as: sales reps, oil rig inspectors, field technicians, etc. through mobile devices like BlackBerry®

With Cognos 8 Go! you don’t chase business-critical data, the data finds you

Cognos 8 Go! provides the right information at the right time, maximizing productivity while eliminating unnecessary trips to offices for field staff and executives on the go

Cognos 8 Go! provides instant visibility into the business performance for many industries – Pharma, CPG, Retail, Utilities, Government, Manufacturing, and more

Cognos 8 Go! enables pervasive use of BI for all of your staff and lets them take immediate action when needed

Learn more: Cognos 8 Go! Mobile demo and podcast with RIM

Cognos Now! – New Operational BI Appliance

Cognos Now! is the new operational BI solution delivered as an appliance or as software-as-a-service (SaaS)

Cognos Now! provides operational visibility to the front lines of organizations at a low TCO and with minimal IT resources

Cognos Now!, with real-time and self-service operational dashboards, provides a concise snapshot of operational status and activity

Includes: operational dashboards, analysis, reports, alerting, and data integration

Unlimited user licenses, dashboards, and data sources for a single price

Learn more: Cognos Now! Operational BI Free Trial

Linking HR to Strategy with Workforce Performance

60-70% of budget is workforce—need to view as an investment and align IT, Finance, and HR for return on this investment

The approach: Phase 1—HR/IT as service provider—headcount

Phase 2—HR/IT as business enabler—retention, turnover, aging workforce

Phase 3—HR/IT as business partner—focus on linking human capital information back into planning, focus on impact to profitability

Phase 4—HR/IT as business driver—HR metrics pervasive 

The technology: Cognos Workforce Performance—100+ metrics out-of-the-box to

measure headcount, turnover, demographics, attrition, absenteeism, compensation, performance metrics and more.

Quick to configure, easy to adapt as HR issues change.

Learn more: Cognos 8 Workforce Performance

Forum Breakout Sessions:Performance Management Sessions

Performance Management Framework

Innovation Center for Performance Management sessions

The Performance Manager Overview (Innovation Center)

There is more competitive advantage in optimizing decision-makers than in operational processes: McKinsey

The Performance Management Framework offers 42 cross-department information sweetspots to optimize performance

Previous PM discussions looked at decision layers; we need to look at the decision cycle:

Plan, Measure, Report across departments and levels

Your business balances on the IT-Finance partnership:

Silicon Valley fueled innovation & leadership; your IT organization can do the same.

IT is not a cost center; it is a value generator

Learn more: Cognos Performance Management Framework

Executive Information Management Imperative(Deloitte)

Few companies create competitive advantage through the use of information

Data & information NOT the same!

Billions spent on Enterprise Operations Management (e.g., ERP), thinking it’s Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

Now, EIM is in the spotlight:

Executives won’t fund operational projects & unknown results

Compliance and performance management now priorities

Information seen as strategic asset

Your opportunity:

EIM skills in demand

EIM projects high priority & visibility with C-levels

Business Intelligence Competency Center Roundtable (Innovation Center)

BICC bridges the worlds of IT and business. This is its critical role.

Business should push the BICC; BICC should push IT

Tips:

Partner early and often with business users: Build relationships

Share credit with IT, they were serving users first

Grow power users in EACH department to sustain your effort

Training is less about software & more about your information system (what are your data models)

Pitfalls to avoid:

Bottom-up approach will bottom out (you need exec sponsor!)

Over-promising and over-extending: watch the burden of success!

Learn more: Business Intelligence Competency Centers

Office of Finance Roundtable (Innovation Center)

Deloitte: turnover rates for CFOs still high – compliance, lack of focus, etc.

CFOs have 4 Roles: Catalyst, Strategist, Steward, Operator

First two are outward-looking and provide the most value. Emphasis on decision-making and strategic investments

Last two are internally focused. Emphasis on efficiency and control

Forecast accuracy has greatest impact on investor opinion. But it’s the capability that most execs are dissatisfied with. Without information about future outlook we manage to the quarter and just cut budgets to make it

Keys to successful PM deployments: communication, care & feeding

Care & Feeding: for users–think beyond training. PM projects fail if built around certain individuals. Need to build organizational capacity instead

Think about the kinds of leaders you need for each phase:

Early on: entrepreneurial and risk-taking, need someone who has passion and vision

2nd generation – more about maintaining momentum, product tweaks for better performance

Learn more: Cognos Innovation Center

Developing an End-to-End Cognos Solution(Applied Signal Technology)

3 Key Wins with Performance Management: Visibility into application usage: led to renegotiating maintenance & support

contracts based on actual use and a 53% savings

Expense analysis & control: better understanding of project costs and better management of costs that cannot be re-imbursed

Resource tracking & planning: improved management of costs and human capital to better respond to unpredictable changes in workload

Keys to Success/ Lessons Learned: Meet the needs of all users: get feedback and build POCs for each user group.

Establish contact with each for prototype development

Get executive buy-in up-front & demonstrate ROI: 200% return on 3 pre-production side projects; improved competitiveness

Enhance as you convert: clean up bad data; replace hard coding in reports with prompts and links to eliminate logic errors

Select the right team: Half-time expertise better than full-time inefficiency

Network: conferences & user groups for continuous learning

Additional Resources

Cognos Forum post-site

TechTalk Insider (Exclusively for Cognos Customers)

Newsletter: Cognos Performance Perspectives Latest issue

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