Reporting: The Catalyst for Performance Management

Step 2: Extending Insights through BI

By Tracy Harris, Campaign Manager, Product Marketing, Cognos Inc.

Reporting has historically been a common starting point for Cognos customers beginning their Performance Management initiatives. As part of a four-part series, we will reveal the business intelligence roadmap that many successful Cognos customers have followed to achieve performance management.

The first article in this series focused on the most common initial step: Solving immediate reporting needs. After these initial needs are taken care of, organizations will often use their first success to breed more success - adding new departments and additional capabilities to the initial project to extend their insight into the business through BI.

Figure 1: Extend insight through Business Intelligence

Beyond Reporting: Partnering for success

Once the initial reporting project has achieved its goals, the next step for many organizations take is to extend the reporting solution to other departmental needs and add additional capabilities that improve insight into the business. This can happen in one of two ways:

• A business unit who viewed the success of the original reporting solution spearheads the initiative and they look to IT to help them deliver on the solution. For example, a marketing executive might see the success of a project for the sales department and approach them to produce information that is targeted to the marketing team; or
• IT identifies another key department or 'sweet spot of information' and partners with the business to deliver a solution. For example, IT might have noticed that the information they have just delivered to sales or marketing could be of use to the executive team.

In either case, delivering a successful solution is achieved through a strong partnership between IT and the business unit. The IT department understands the technology, infrastructure and data sources that are available and the business prime understands what data and results are needed to deliver actionable information. Together, the two can provide strategic value that helps extend insight and improve overall business performance.

Understanding "How we are Doing": Measuring and Monitoring

Measuring and monitoring business targets and goals allow an organization to clearly understand ‘how’ they are doing. When initial reporting needs are solved and the organization has better insight into the mounds of data locked deep within the IT infrastructure, many organizations then use the platform to extend and display the data via business and executive-level scorecards and dashboards.

Scorecards allow an organization to present findings to the business audience at a higher level and can help to align teams and tactics with strategy, communicate goals consistently and monitor performance against targets. Executive-level and business dashboards are the next step in the measuring and monitoring process as they can help to communicate complex information quickly. With a strong reporting infrastructure already in place, the extension of these capabilities to the appropriate audiences easily enhances business performance by translating information from the various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations. It can allow the user to view multiple results together with drill-through access to other data sources and reports for more detail. Providing scorecarding and dashboarding capabilities to executive and business members of an organization has been cited by Cognos customers as a way to demonstrate value, engage team members and gain support for a business intelligence initiative.

Understanding Why: Extending reporting and analysis

In tandem with discovering 'how' an organization is doing, the thirst for information also extends to understanding the causative factors behind exceptional performance (good or bad). This is performed by:

• Adding additional capabilities to carry out deep comparative analysis of performance from different points of view in order to quickly and easily get to the "why" behind an event or action; and
• Adding additional sources of data from various departments that can help users understand the information behind performance measurements. For example, additional data sources might help reveal that above average sales in particular regions are based on early adoption of the latest “hot” colors in certain product lines.

By adding deep analysis capabilities, business users gain the ability to drill down or drill through, slice or dice, rank, sort, forecast or nest information to gain insight into trends, causes or effects. And, by extending the reporting infrastructure to other data sources, including ERP data, data warehouses, and other sources of data collected from various departments, the business gains the ability to determine additional insight the ‘why’ behind business performance at the most appropriate level of detail.

Finding the "Sweet spots of information"

Earlier, we touched on organizations that identify ‘sweet spots of information’ to help improve business performance. Overall, there are 42 key decision areas or ‘information sweet spots’ within a business, organized by eight major functions: Finance, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, Operations, Human Resources, Information Technology, plus an overarching set for Executive Management. Looking at these information sweet spots and understanding which metrics and data are key to the performance management process is a challenge for any business or IT department. To achieve performance management success, you need to first identify which departments hold the data that answers immediate needs and pull them into the infrastructure one by one with a solid, repeatable solution. But how can an organization identify these 42 sweet spots and move forward quickly on extending the solution?

The Performance Manager

Over the past decade, Cognos has worked with thousands of customers around the globe to implement performance management initiatives. By collecting the insights from these customers, Cognos has put together the framework of information “sweet spots” for each business function that can be used to help IT identify and understand the business needs in its new book called, " The Performance Manager, Proven Strategies for Turning Information into Higher Business". This book provides templates that show what information is required and who needs to see it for each major decision area in the company. "The Performance Manager" can be used in one of two ways: it can be read chapter by chapter to understand specific “information sweet spots” within a business function that is of interest at a critical time or it can read in its entirety to gain a broad understanding of how to make better performance a truly cross-organizational exercise.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Cognos 8 BI is the only BI product to deliver the complete range of BI capabilities: reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, business event management as well as data integration, on a single, proven architecture. Cognos 8 Business Intelligence delivers a simplified BI environment that can be extended to business users and enable better decision-making in an organization with an enterprise-scale foundation for performance management. Easy to integrate, deploy and use, Cognos 8 BI delivers a solid reporting foundation that can extend as needs in the business grow. The BI solution is coupled with true expertise and knowledge assets to help an organization understand and implement a BI strategy that can improve overall business performance. In next month’s issue we will continue to explore the Performance Management Journey to implement Enterprise-Wide business intelligence and discuss how standardizingprocesses and technologies, solving the information challenge and gaining broad user adoption of business intelligence practices help achieve high performance.