Driving Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence

Part 3 in the "Reporting: The Catalyst for Performance Management" series

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

In the first two articles in this four-part series, we described steps 1 and 2 in the Cognos Reporting-led Performance Management roadmap.

We discussed how, when using reporting as the starting point for meeting your performance management objectives, it is best to begin with a basic reporting solution that addresses your most pressing business needs and then extend the solution to more users, more departments, and more functional areas to generate shared insight into performance.

In this article, we explain how many organizations have successfully leveraged the initial reporting solution to put in place a foundation for enterprise performance management. Find out how they have created standard processes and technologies, and made business intelligence available to more users in a variety of new ways.

Standardizing on best-of-breed BI technologies

As the reporting solution evolves, there are significant advantages to be gained by implementing standard technologies and processes for business intelligence and performance management.

Many organizations have found it advantageous to replace multiple systems, which typically have limited focus and generate silos of application-specific data, with a smaller number of best-of-breed solutions. It results in fewer tools for IT to implement and maintain. It means the organization spends less time evaluating software and more time using it to manage performance. The total cost of ownership is reduced significantly because of lower maintenance, support, and training costs. And it enables organizations to deliver that all-important single version of the truth needed to create a foundation for driving their performance.

When choosing a standard, there are many factors to take into account. Does the vendor have a proven track record? Have they demonstrated an eagerness to partner with customers to help them meet their performance management goals? Are they recognized as leaders and innovators in the fields of business intelligence and performance management? Do they have a vision for the future of BI and performance management?

And, of course, choosing the right solution is critical. Does it provide all of the capabilities needed by all of your business users? Can it accommodate multiple, heterogeneous data sources? Is it built on a modern, web-services based, services-oriented architecture that will deliver the performance you need now and scale to meet tomorrow’s needs as your solution grows? Detailed information about standardization can be found here.

The Information Challenge

As organizations begin to standardize on processes and technologies that help improve business performance, they soon realize that business intelligence exposes vast data inconsistencies contained in their ERP and CRM systems, in their databases, and in other data silos. All of this data must then be brought together to create consistent, meaningful information.

In response to this challenge, Cognos recommends that IT departments first formulate a strategy that addresses the need to provide a consistent and complete view of information in terms that the business community understands. With this in place, IT can then address reconciliation and data quality issues as a separate initiative – one that has a broader impact across the organization, not just BI alone. In this way, the business can immediately start to leverage BI information across multiple information silos, and IT has a strategy in place to address the broader issue of data quality without slowing down the BI initiative.
To enable this, Cognos provides the ability to access heterogeneous data sources via a common business view and create consistency through a single metadata model. Cognos also maintains strong partnerships with leading vendors such as IBM and Informatica, who can help tackle the challenge of information management and broader data quality issues. Working in tandem with these partners, and with pre-built integration of the partner technologies, Cognos ensures organizations can put in place a BI platform to address business needs and an Information Management infrastructure with high quality information that can serve BI and the many other initiatives across IT. As a result, the organization can deliver needed information immediately to the business and position themselves to tackle the other information challenges they face.

IT-Business Partnership and Executive Sponsorship

In addition to a sound data and performance management strategy, it is critical to have a strong execution plan that aligns business and IT.

The IT department value must be recognized beyond implementation and report creation. They must be a true partner with business and contributor of business benefits. To do this they must build trust among members of business/IT working groups, and create an environment in which people can engage one another and generate positive cultural change. When it comes to doing this, many Cognos customers have found it useful to start small, with a key business partner and executive sponsor, and then expand their partnering with each success and as new business partners emerge. With this scenario, executive sponsorship – typically involving a CIO and CFO – is crucial to gaining momentum.

To speed the process of business and IT partnering, Cognos recognized that IT and business needed a common language and focus. To that end, we recently published "The Performance Manager" to help organizations identify the information sweet spots where IT and business can collaborate to identify high value areas for BI projects across their organization.

Building a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC)

To ensure a successful project it is also important to follow best practices when selecting, implementing, and using your reporting solution, and to cultivate a culture that understands the value of BI.

Many organizations have found it useful to create a BI Competency Center (BICC) that brings together representatives of the business and IT communities to promote BI expertise and best practices throughout the enterprise. A BICC can provide some very tangible benefits, including a lower cost of ownership, faster and easier understanding and adoption of effective BI and performance management practices, and the ability to enforce proven standards throughout the enterprise.

Cognos, through the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, provides information on building, developing and operating BI Competency Centers. The Center also brings together technology experts, finance professionals, and industry thought leaders to share their knowledge of best practices in performance management. The center has generated a wealth of information, and a wide range of useful tools to help organizations meet their performance management goals. Among them are the Cognos Performance Blueprints, which help speed the deployment of business intelligence throughout an organization and which will be discussed in the final article in this series.

Reaching more users with business intelligence

Finally, if your reporting solution is to be effective in addressing your performance management goals, it must increasingly deliver BI to a larger audience with a variety of different requirements.

Business users want BI to fit into their every day working lives – to integrate with company portals and search capabilities, to be accessible from mobile devices, and to work within process flows and with other applications.
At Cognos, we’ve addressed this need with a range of existing and soon-to-be-available Cognos 8 Go! Consumer Modes, including

• Cognos Go! Mobile for securely receiving and interacting with reports and analysis through BlackBerry® handheld devices
• Cognos Go! Search for finding Cognos 8 BI reports and integrating BI content with search applications such as Autonomy, Fast, Google, and IBM
• Cognos 8 Go! Office, which lets users view, interact with, and refresh BI content within Microsoft Office applications
• Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel,® which provides a way to explore and analyze trusted, secure, multidimensional information from Cognos 8 BI and other data sources in a familiar Microsoft Excel workspace
• Cognos Now! Operational Business Intelligence, an innovative solution that offers self-service dashboards, integrated data, analysis, and reports as a prepackaged BI appliance or as a hosted service.

Training

Increasing adoption of a solution also means ensuring that users have the right level of knowledge about the tools and process that is appropriate for their interactions. Providing appropriate training has been proven to deliver faster acceptance, shorten learning curves, reduce support costs, and enable quicker ROI on a solution.

Cognos customers have chosen a variety of way to implement training practices. Many provide an overview of the initiative on their internal employee site or distribute internal newsletter updates that describe the business intelligence initiative and offer training options. Options can include Computer-Based Training (CBT) modules, in-class or on-site training. Cognos provides a wide range of training options.

Reporting-driven enterprise BI

By standardizing on best-of-breed BI technologies for your reporting needs, developing a culture of BI excellence with a BICC and other knowledge-sharing initiatives, and addressing the needs of ever greater numbers of business users in your organization, you can leverage the basic reporting system that you deployed in steps 1 and 2 of the Reporting-led Performance Management roadmap and drive BI across your enterprise.

In doing this, you put yourself in a strong position to address the final step of the process, and transform all of your business processes through performance management. That is the subject of the upcoming final article in this series.