Cognos
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Transcript of Cognos
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS.
COGNOS METRICS
MANAGER: THE NEXT
GENERATION OF
SCORECARDING
TECHNOLOGY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
MANAGING PERFORMANCE WITH SCORECARDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Aligning company strategy and behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Driving company communication, integration, and alignment . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Responding to performance results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
ACHIEVING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
WITH COGNOS METRICS MANAGER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
HOW COGNOS METRICS MANAGER ADDRESSES
THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Align company strategy and behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Drive company communication, integration, and alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Respond to performance results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
COGNOS METRICS MANAGER KEY FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY . . . . . . . . 13
Built for business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Built for IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Technical Specifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
ABOUT COGNOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
ABSTRACT
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
2
This white paper will demonstrate how next-generation
scorecarding technology will help organizations not
only survive, but improve their performance in a
challenging economy. Cognos® Metrics Manager is a
performance management system shift from the simple
performance measurement with existing scorecarding
software to the realm of performance management.
Cognos Metrics Manager enables the enterprise to com-
municate and align their human capital with corporate
strategies, their associated tactics, key performance
indicators (targets & results), accountabilities and
underlying business intelligence resources in order
to take focused action to adjust and improve overall
performance.
Cognos Metrics Manager goes beyond static presenta-
tions of limited data to provide a common performance
management system based on current and historically
tracked metrics. Decision-makers at all levels of the
enterprise can navigate performance problems, discover
the cause through guided analysis, collaborate on the
solution, and make better business decisions every day.
Cognos Metrics Manager enables organizations to
make effective decisions quickly and simply. As such, it
further fulfills the Cognos vision—to help organizations
apply business intelligence strategically to optimize
corporate performance management (CPM).
“For too long, BI has been forced into a strong but
tangential relationship to measuring, monitoring,
and managing the business. Cognos Metrics
Manager now allows BI to take a central position in
business decisions—a role that can enable the entire
enterprise to systematically enact the will of man-
agement.”
Bob Moran, Aberdeen Group
At the start of each business day, organizations face any
number of challenges: to drive innovation, to launch
new products, to improve product quality, to create
more value for their customers, to develop new
markets, to strategically manage human capital, and
ultimately, to increase shareholder value.
The entire employee base in an organization must make
the decisions that respond to these strategic challenges.
And they must make these decisions in a business
climate driven by sudden economic or market shifts.
Historically, the metrics that have been used to support
these decisions have been financial. Yet a complex
business climate demands information that goes beyond
financial metrics. It demands forward-looking, or
“leading” metrics that can be integrated into a compre-
hensive performance management environment that can
drive future value.
Until now, it has been difficult for companies to move
beyond financial metrics to a performance management
environment. One of the biggest challenges has been
consolidating corporate performance data from disparate
sources into centralized, coherent, and meaningful
metrics system that they can trust—one version of the
“truth.” Many companies rely on performance data
drawn from many different systems: ERP, CRM, finan-
cial spreadsheets, flat data files, data marts, presentation
software, and other sources. Each system provides
important information about a particular aspect of the
company’s performance, but each collects, defines, and
displays the information in a different way.
Decision-makers devote great amounts of time, energy,
and resources trying to consolidate this data to under-
stand and report on their performance. What they
often discover in doing this is that their peers have
consolidated the data in different ways, each accord-
ing to their own interpretation of the strategy. Metrics
are incomplete, conflicting, or limited to a particular
department or function. Sometimes they are all three.
Other than key financial metrics (which are well-
known and well-defined), decision-makers struggle to
obtain a consolidated understanding of performance
against corporate strategies and targets.
In these situations, decision-makers often spend more
time discussing the validity of numbers than solving per-
formance issues. Without a performance management
system that provides a single, unified and consistently
defined view of their performance, decision-makers have
a great deal of difficulty understanding how the
company is performing and have little opportunity to
collaborate for effective decision-making.
INTRODUCTION
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
3
Scorecards have been the foundation that enables an
organization to translate its strategy into specific, meas-
urable objectives that can be consistently defined,
applied, understood, and communicated across all areas
of the company. They meet the need for decision-
makers to share a common understanding of the
processes and actions that drive an organization and
provide a single source of metrics and targets that
measure organizational performance against strategic
goals and objectives. Scorecard initiatives can support a
broader performance management or quality control
methodology within a specific department, division, or
across an entire enterprise.
One of the most popular management methodologies is
the Balanced Scorecard, introduced in 1992 by Drs.
Robert Kaplan and David Norton.1 Kaplan and Norton
asserted that a company’s financial metrics reflected the
cumulative effects of only a small proportion of the
decisions made within that company, and that its true
value could be more accurately evaluated and increased
by measuring the effect of decisions made at every level
and throughout the company. They asserted that it was in
the interplay of people, processes, and other intangible
assets that the next competitive advantage was to be
found. To understand, measure, and leverage the value
of this new competitive advantage, they envisioned a
new class of metrics that would quantify the value
created by the many processes that take place within
and across an organization.
One well-known quality control methodology is Six
Sigma. Other quality control methodologies include
Total Quality Management (TQM), certification under
the International Standards Organization (ISO), and the
Baldridge Awards.
Existing scorecarding technology no longer meets the
constantly evolving and fluid nature of today’s business
climate. Most existing scorecard solutions are hard-
wired to ERP systems and require extensive coding to
change. This makes them of little use when the
company needs to change priorities quickly in response
to changing market conditions or performance issues
and measure its performance using new metrics or
against new benchmarks. Also, existing scorecard soft-
ware consists primarily of static HTML pages and
usually offer only limited BI capabilities. These solu-
tions may indicate that performance is off track, but
they cannot provide any insight into why or facilitate
focused action at the point of maximum impact.
Technology advancements have set the stage for a wide-
scale adoption of performance management systems—
next-generation scorecarding software that can be
integrated into the wider context of corporate perform-
ance management (CPM). This software will allow
users to discover which of their metrics are on or off
track, why they are that way, and what can be done
about them.
There is a critical need for next-generation scorecarding
software. According to a recent survey, fewer than 35
per cent of high-level decision-makers said they base
their decisions on their own corporate data. At the same
time, 60 per cent of those same people surveyed said
that they count on technology to help them make faster
decisions and to increase co-ordination around the
decision-making process.2
MANAGING PERFORMANCE WITH SCORECARDS
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
4
1 Harvard Business Review. The Balanced Scorecard: Measures that DrivePerformance, January-February 1992.
2 Rob Rose, Smooth Sailing on Rough Seas, Cognos Press, 2002.
ALIGNING COMPANY STRATEGY AND BEHAVIOR
A successful strategy is one that can be made relevant to
everyone within an organization. But a common problem
that many organizations face is the inherent difficulty in
linking their strategy, people, and performance through a
unified metrics framework. Unfortunately, this is a
problem whose size and complexity grows in tandem
with the organization: the larger or more geographically
diverse the company, the greater the gap between strategy
and execution.
This problem can occur when a company has agreed on
a workable strategy but is having difficulty cleanly
communicating desired behavior. Or, it has a workable
strategy and clearly defined goals, but lacks the metrics
around which people can measure their performance
against them.
DRIVING COMPANY COMMUNICATION,
INTEGRATION, AND ALIGNMENT
A second core problem for many organizations is the
difficulty they face in combining their disparate data
assets into a single reference point. In most cases, an
organization will base its decisions on Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) that draw data from different sources:
ERP systems, financial spreadsheets, CRM software,
and others. Not only do these different systems report
on performance in different areas, the data they collect
may not be collected, shared or defined in a consistent
way across the company. This creates a disconnect
where there should be unity.
In this situation, there is no single system around which
organizations can align and communicate performance
results and actions. Without a shared performance man-
agement system with an agreed-to set of metrics, each
department may suggest different priorities or provide
different answers to the same question. For example:
falling revenue from a particular vertical market may
lead to widely divergent views on the best course of
action: better training for the sales team, hiring more
sales people; improving marketing, developing a new
product, or discounting the current product.
This problem can also arise when a company lacks a
standardized, commonly agreed-upon definition of its
key reports, or when a particular metric is measured in
different ways across the company. Different managers
may use different metrics. Its executives use different
key reports that may measure things related to the cor-
porate strategy, but their relative importance and their
relationship to other reports is not centrally defined.
The company is unable to measure its effectiveness
against the overall strategy and there is no alignment of
tactics with strategy.
In the age of mergers, acquisitions, and global competi-
tion, this is a common problem. In Using the Balanced
Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Kaplan
and Norton describe how executives at a then-recently
merged bank agreed “to provide superior service to
targeted customers,” only to find out later that each of
its 25 senior executives had a different definition of
“superior service” and a different image of “targeted
customers.”3
THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
5
3 Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Kaplan andNorton, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1996.
RESPONDING TO PERFORMANCE RESULTS
A third problem occurs primarily when companies try
to respond to severe, abrupt, or unexpected changes in
market conditions using traditional, scorecards that
may be hard-wired to an ERP system or some other
data source that requires extensive programming inter-
vention to change.
Should a company need to change its priorities—for
example, from margins to customer service, or from
acquisitions to cost-reductions, it will need to make
operational changes within and across each functional
area. Quite often, these changes tend to be short-term;
as such, companies need to quickly understand how its
processes operate and how they need to be altered. A
company in this situation also needs metrics that can be
updated frequently to let its decision-makers evaluate
and re-evaluate their progress against new priorities at
a faster pace. The company’s performance management
system needs to support these shifts in performance
focus without needing to be re-wired.
The longer the company spends figuring out how it
works and how to evaluate its performance, the more
serious the problem becomes, the more momentum it
loses, and the more difficult it becomes to take corrective
action. Standard financial metrics are indicators of past
events. They cannot explain or predict how a perform-
ance change in one area affects performance or outcomes
in another.
Each of these problems should be familiar to most
organizations, as they are well-documented in the
business press. In addition, it is not uncommon for
organizations to be dealing with each problem at the
same time. Each scenario illustrates a different aspect of
the deficiencies of traditional metrics in responding to
the challenges of the modern business climate.
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
6
Cognos Metrics Manager is a next-generation tech-
nology for creating, managing, presenting, and delivering
an organization’s critical metrics. It enables organizations
to create an effective performance management system
that links execution and accountability to goals and
strategy, letting them monitor, analyze, manage, and
report key performance metrics at every level of the
business. As such, it extends Cognos’ ability to help
organizations apply business intelligence strategically
across the enterprise to optimize corporate performance
management.
Through an easy-to-use interface, Cognos Metrics
Manager provides all enterprise managers with a single
source of current and past enterprise performance
metrics, measures, and information through which they
can manage and collaborate on performance issues.
It provides business performance navigation—not
just scorecard navigation—and supports any business
performance or quality methodology requirement.
Scorecard view at a glance
Users can readily see how the business is progressing
against its strategy, set priorities for their actions, and
understand how their decisions affect the company’s
performance.
Balanced scorecard strategy map
Cognos Metrics Manager displays a company’s progress
against its corporate strategy in easy-to-understand
formats such as traffic light indicators, directional
arrows, or numerical scores. This lets managers see at a
glance which metrics need their immediate attention.
Users across the organization can quickly see which key
areas are performing well, which ones are not, and can
focus their time and energy where it matters most. They
become self-sufficient, able to access the metrics they are
accountable for.
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
7
ACHIEVING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WITH COGNOS METRICS MANAGER
Cognos Metrics Manager lets companies monitor any
number of KPIs at one time. If one of the KPIs goes
outside the defined range, then the decision-maker can
take immediate action. They can access related business
intelligence sources and reports to analyze the underlying
causes, and link up with others to collaborate on the
performance issue.
Tightly integrated within the Cognos BI framework and
Cognos Analytic Applications, Cognos Metrics Manager
is supported by an application architecture and business
intelligence layer with reporting and analysis, finance
and planning, and data warehouse applications.
Cognos Metrics Manager also works with Cognos
Planning Series. Organizations can provide visibility
into plan versus actual performance and communicate
goal-driven planning metrics to thousands of employees
across the enterprise. Cognos Metrics Manager can
draw data from anywhere in your organization, in any
format. This integration creates a truly collaborative de-
cision-making environment for business users, enabling
both the effective sharing and rapid distribution of in-
formation tied to key corporate performance indicators.
Integrated analysis
Cognos Metrics Manager is also a browser-based appli-
cation. This provides benefits to both end-users and IT
departments. It means end-users are not required to
download or install additional software, and it means
that IT departments can deploy it easily across an
enterprise without needing to devote large numbers of
resources to keep it running smoothly.
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
8
ALIGN COMPANY STRATEGY AND BEHAVIOR
Cognos Metrics Manager presents the metrics that
guide key business decisions in a format that accurately
reflects the complex environment in which decision-
makers operate. This is done through strategy maps,
dynamic impact analysis diagrams, and tools for guided
analysis and collaboration. Cognos Metrics Manager
also enables managers to prioritize and rank individual
performance metrics according to a company’s current
performance focus.
Align metrics with strategy and initiatives
As a performance management environment, Cognos
Metrics Manager can link all employees accountable
for key performance goals to the high-level strategies
through a complete set of commonly agreed-to metrics.
These key metrics can be tracked over time to catch
performance issues and to provide a single source of
results upon which critical corporate performance
decisions can be made. Such a scorecard can articulate
to everyone in an organization exactly how the organi-
zation is performing and how people need to react to
support the corporate strategy. Decision-makers can
identify and act at the point of maximum impact with
complete information and facts rather than relying on
“gut feel” or a possibly incomplete understanding.
In this way, Cognos Metrics Manager supports an
organization’s efforts to create a performance-oriented
culture.
More specifically, it allows decision-makers to monitor
Key Performance Indicators in their area and helps
them understand how a change that has occurred in one
KPI is affecting performance in another. From here, the
user can navigate an impact analysis diagram to find
the root cause of the change, explore all related reports,
conduct multidimensional analysis of current and past
results for a deeper understanding of the issue, and then
take the appropriate action. By using these features,
decision-makers can understand and predict how the
decisions they make support the overall strategy and
how their own performance affects that of the overall
organization. And because of the dynamic nature of
Cognos Metrics Manager, they can see the results of
their decisions in near real time.
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
9
HOW COGNOS METRICS MANAGER ADDRESSES THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS
“Staying on top of the factors that drive our business is
critical in this tumultuous economic environment.
Cognos Metrics Manager is easy to use and powerful
enough to provide the scorecarding solution we
need to manage business performance across our
company.”
Harry Hixson, Senior Vice President of Information
Technology, CTX Mortgage Company
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
10
DRIVE COMPANY COMMUNICATION,
INTEGRATION, AND ALIGNMENT
Cognos Metrics Manager supports collaborative decision-
making around a common view of a company’s strategy;
that is, one set of metrics that the organization has agreed
to define and measure in a consistent manner across its
entire operation. It enables organizations to select, define,
and share the KPIs that measure their progress against
their stated corporate strategy. Metrics can be configured
to draw data from the source that best articulates per-
formance against the strategy. The executive team, or a
business analyst, can define the metric—the contributing
elements, the inter-relationships, and the thresholds—
easily, from the desktop. Metrics can change with the
business requirements, with the software automatically
providing context to help the user understand them, such
as reports, numbers, or other metrics. The metrics can be
shared with all users, as defined in security and adminis-
tration. In this way, the organization has one version of
the truth (their strategic goals); the means to measure
progress against it (the metrics); and the way to commu-
nicate that progress out to all staff to guide their activity
(the shared scorecard).
The corporate strategy that is created in the boardroom
is shared, and decision-makers at every level understand
how and why the company is performing the way it is
because they are all operating with metrics from the
same source. This allows companies to flexibly adjust
their strategy over time in response to results that are
displayed and analyzed through Cognos Metrics
Manager. The openness of this approach means that
companies can empower employees with responsibilities
for a metric and users can manage the responsibility
effectively. They can see how they are performing, under-
stand the root causes for changes in performance, and
how to improve it.
RESPOND TO PERFORMANCE RESULTS
How can organizations, particularly those with lines of
business and physical assets spread across different
markets and countries, effectively set new priorities and
change strategic direction? More importantly, how does
an organization make these changes without losing
momentum? Cognos Metrics Manager enables this by
providing a performance management environment that
lets all corporate decision-makers effect business
changes on the fly with accurate and up-to-date infor-
mation, quickly and easily. The openness and flexibility
built in to Cognos Metrics Manager are key to enabling
organizations to quickly redirect a course of action in
response to performance results or market changes.
Cognos Metrics Manager lets companies create a
performance management environment that supports
their corporate goals. It achieves this by supporting a
source of consistently defined and calculated metrics—
one version of the truth. Performance management
operates on the principle that a strategy with a well-
defined set of corporate objectives and associated
metrics are what is important to focus on and to give an
enterprise the competitive advantage in their market.
Cognos Metrics Manager is the first technology to
make this principle a reality.
Corporate Performance Management (CPM)—a
framework that helps companies drive, monitor, and
understand their performance at the enterprise level—
rests on three integrated capabilities:
Enterprise Scorecarding tracks performance against
your strategic plans, and monitors the key metrics of
day-to-day operations.
Enterprise Planning turns corporate goals into concrete
plans and budgets that communicate a common
purpose throughout the organization.
Enterprise Business Intelligence turns data into mean-
ingful reports and analysis to make better decisions.
Only Cognos delivers these three integrated capabilities.
Choose one vendor with confidence, knowing the entire
range of software to support your efforts is available,
flexible, and scalable as your requirements evolve.
In Smooth Sailing on Rough Seas, Rob Rose, VP of
Strategy and Business Development for Cognos,
examines how distributed decision-making based on
business intelligence metrics can impact corporate
performance. Much of Rose’s thinking and insights
centre on the well-documented disconnect between
planning and execution that is common in many organ-
izations, and the need for a performance management
environment that can bridge this gap and propel a
business toward higher performance.
Rose states that corporate agility will be the overriding
imperative for success in a turbulent economy, and that
a company must reconsider the importance of all
decision-makers as owners of business performance—
from executives to line of business managers and
knowledge workers. For many organizations, this
means undergoing a fundamental change in their
decision-making culture. It means focusing attention
and leveraging the ways in which a company creates
value in the long-term, rather than simply focusing on
reducing head counts or divesting itself of physical
assets to survive in the short term. This idea lies at the
heart of corporate performance management (CPM).
Scorecarding is an entry point, or an on-ramp to CPM.
From the experiences of high-performance companies,
Rose distilled eight simple, yet foundational principles
that, when understood and practiced by committed
executives, their management teams and employees—
and supported by the right business intelligence tech-
nologies—can be the catalyst for breakthrough
performance that goes beyond incremental continuous
improvement.
CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
11
“[Cognos] Metrics Manager is more than a scorecard’s
red, yellow, and green lights. It is an innovative and im-
portant component of any firm’s Enterprise Performance
Management (EPM) architecture that administers Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter, and is the
entry point for executives and managers to manage the
business using active data analysis.”
Source: John Hagerty, Vice President and General Manager,
The AMR Research Alert, Cognos Adds Important EPM
Component With Metrics Manager, October 09, 2002
The eight principles are:
1. Enlist decision-makers across the organization, pro-
viding everyone with a shared, holistic view into the
company’s overall strategy, and a clear understanding
of how their role impacts overall performance.
2. Create a foundation for collaboration and enlight-
ened decision-making, based on a common, consis-
tent context.
3. Empower people to make decisions at their point of
maximum impact, to accelerate the speed of effective
decision-making.
4. Build a shared truth, enabling collaborative decision
making around metrics, performance measurements,
events, and challenges.
5. Act on facts, which provide the validation people
need to make informed and effective decisions that
drive high performance business results.
6. Create a holistic approach to performance manage-
ment that extends across the enterprise and includes
both financial and non-financial drivers.
7. Link decision makers across the enterprise with a
network of shared information so everyone across
the enterprise can act in a shared context.
8. Create a culture around decision-making where
everyone has insight into a shared world of
performance information.
Cognos Metrics Manager enables companies to adopt
and practice these principles at the enterprise level, or in
specific departments within the organization. It is built to
articulate the complex interplay of people and processes
and to leverage this complexity into increased value and
to tightly link strategy to execution—whether across
the company or within a particular department—and
performance. In doing so, it is a cornerstone of effective
decision-making and higher performance.
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
12
A complete performance management environment,
Cognos Metrics Manager fulfills the promise of next-
generation scorecarding and is an enabler of corporate
performance management. Below is a brief discussion
of its key features and functionalities.
BUILT FOR BUSINESS
Flexible, open methodology support
The flexibility of the software lets you model metrics
and their relationship to each other based on any
standard or proprietary scorecarding and management
methodology you already use.
Summary views from an easy-to-use interface
Cognos Metrics Manager displays summary views based
on the Balanced Scorecard and other methodologies,
and users can easily explore detailed metrics results
and history.
Analyze issues to the required depth
The rich Cognos scorecarding environment, through in-
tegration with Cognos reporting and analysis capabili-
ties, lets you analyze performance issues to understand
what drives a metric’s change in order to make better
decisions. Choose between a reportlet or a live custom
URL for further information or greater context. URLs
can point toward live dashboards, BI reports, SCM or
CRM systems, or Web sites.
Flexible information delivery
Users can be notified by email at their desktop or on
their PDA when a metric changes status. They can show
or hide information and add custom benchmarks to
their own personal scorecards.
Detailed view of accountability and performance
Managers can view metrics by their owners for a better
view of individuals’ performance. Three- or five-state
status indicators provide more granularity and show
when performance is approaching or slightly exceeding
targets.
Work online or offline
View your scorecards from any Web browser or gener-
ate PDF files that you can print and share in hard copy.
Consolidated views of cross-functional metrics
Cognos Metrics Manager uniquely combines disparate
metrics from different functional areas and data sources
to create a single repository of the metrics that the
organization can agree on to create scorecards and
thereby monitor their performance against targets and
objectives.
Embedded business analysis tools
Business user tools simplify cross-impact analysis of
metrics. Easy-to-use multidimensional analysis tools let
them uncover the root cause of performance issues.
Impact analysis diagram
COGNOS METRICS MANAGER KEY FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
13
Dynamic diagrams
Dynamic diagrams give users the capability to view
metrics in context overlaid on images, such as JPEG and
GIF files (e.g., revenue maps, corporate strategy maps,
floor diagrams, or process maps). These diagrams can be
easily created using the drag-and-drop administration
interface to place metrics on top of pre-defined graphical
images.
BUILT FOR IT
Metrics definition from disparate data sources
Cognos Metrics Manager can import and provide data
to populate and support your scorecard from any
source, including Cognos BI sources, Excel spread-
sheets, flat files, user-entered values and third-party
databases. A Data Loader Utility is provided to
automate the loading of data from flat files.
Easy to deploy
Zero-footprint architecture means users and adminis-
trators do not require software installed on their
desktop, making global intranet or extranet use and de-
ployment easier.
Simplified metrics creation
Administrators can define a metric once for use in any
scorecard in their organization. Centrally defined KPIs
ensure a consistent version of the truth and priority for
all users. Administrator menus let you define all aspects
of a metric: threshold ranges, benchmarks, data source
definition, contact names, and URL links for contextual
information in any format.
Scalability
Cognos Metrics Manager was built to handle the
data volumes and user requirements of Fortune 1000
companies.
Flexible metrics building
Cognos Metrics Manager lets you control the specific
metrics or KPIs you wish to track, how they are com-
bined, criteria for good and poor performance for each
indicator, and set links to supporting reports of any
format, which can provide additional analysis and
context for users.
Central metrics store
Cognos Metrics Manager historical data, as well as
scorecard, diagrams, and metric definitions are main-
tained in an industry-standard relational database.
Cognos product interoperability
Cognos Metrics Manager is interoperable with the
Cognos enterprise-scale BI framework and full suite of
BI tools, and is integrated with Cognos Web Services.
View metrics by owner
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
14
Application access and security
Integration with the Cognos BI access and security
foundation means users are easily assigned to classes.
These classes determine the scorecards and metrics
they can access through a simple and single sign-on di-
alogue box.
Metrics relationship auto-diagrams
Automatically generated HTML displays of the
relationship between metrics reduces implementation
effort.
Balanced Scorecard Collaborative-certified
Certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative,
Cognos Metrics Manager includes Strategy Maps
and other Kaplan & Norton Balanced Scorecard best
practices that can be easily and quickly modeled though
menu-based administrator functions.
Utilization monitoring and analysis
Cognos Metrics Manager can track its own performance.
It allows administrators to analyze how the application is
being utilized throughout the organization.
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
• Multiple Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows,
Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AiX),
• Multiple Application Servers (Sun One 7, Apache
Tomcat 4.1.18, IBM Websphere, 5, BEA Weblogic
7.0.1 and 8.1)
• Enterprise RDBMS Repository (MS-SQL Server,
Oracle),
• J2EE Application Servers,
• Browser IE V5.5 and higher (for users or administra-
tors), or Netscape 6.2 (for users).
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
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ABOUT COGNOS
Cognos is the world leader in business intelligence and
enterprise planning software. Our solutions for corpo-
rate performance management let organizations drive
performance with planning and budgeting, monitor it
with scorecarding, and understand it with enterprise
business intelligence reporting and analysis. Cognos is
the only vendor to support all of these key management
activities in a complete, integrated solution.
Founded in 1969, Cognos today serves more than
22,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enter-
prise business intelligence solutions and services are also
available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners
and resellers.
ABOUT COGNOS
MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:
THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY
16
WWW.COGNOS.COM
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