Transforming Business Through Performance Management

Part 4 in the "Reporting: A Catalyst for Performance Management" series

By Tracy Harris, Campaign Manager, Product Marketing, Cognos

In parts one through three of this series, we described how to use reporting as a starting point for achieving your performance management goals.

Figure 1: Transform business through performance management

We outlined how, beginning with a basic reporting solution that addresses your most critical needs, extending that solution to more departments and functions, and standardizing on enterprise-wide BI can result in a strong business intelligence foundation that ensures your decision makers know how the organization is doing and why.

In this final article, we put in place the last piece of the performance management puzzle – the one that tells you what you should be doing to maximize performance.

Aligning resources, processes, and initiatives for strategy execution

Completing the journey from reporting to performance management means building sustainable and continuous links between all aspects of corporate performance – including resources, processes, and initiatives – and aligning them with corporate strategy.

Cognos customers have done this in a number of ways, including:

• Using scorecards that link strategic objectives, initiatives, and key performance indicators to communicate the right information quickly to the right people
• Gathering information from front-line personnel to identify opportunities and align resources with objectives
• Identifying performance gaps in time to put new initiatives in place and act on them

But these and other integrated business processes are only possible when your enterprise reporting and business intelligence solution is anchored by strong planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation.

Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Consolidation

To understand and drive performance, Cognos customers have found that strategic initiatives must be linked to the planning, budgeting, and forecasting process to drive effective resource allocation across the enterprise. Budgets and forecasts, in turn, need to be supported with certified financial data from an efficient financial consolidation process that provides timely, reliable and transparent view of financial performance.

Effective planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software ensures that everyone in the organization shares the understanding needed to drive stronger performance and build competitive advantage. It enables personnel throughout the enterprise to answer the fundamental business question "what should we be doing?" based to a timely, reliable view of actuals and targets and forecasts.

Building a reliable view of the future based on effective planning makes it possible to generate sound, clear, and flexible strategies based on solid business intelligence. This, in turn, means that you can allocate resources to support corporate objectives, seize opportunities as they are identified, and ensure that operational execution in every part of the enterprise is consistent with overall corporate strategy.

The planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation components of the Cognos solution include Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 Controller and seamless integration into Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

Cognos 8 Planning provides the immediate visibility into resource requirements and future business results that enables higher performance across the enterprise. It includes business modeling capabilities that can be tailored to an organization's exact needs and shared enterprise-wide, so that all personnel, no matter what their roles, stay on track and contribute to big-picture corporate objectives. Sophisticated features and personalization capabilities mean that little training is needed for users to become effective partners in the planning process. This ensures ready adoption and high participation across the enterprise. And it means you spend less time on process and more on performance-enhancing analysis.

Cognos 8 Controller enables enterprise management and financial reporting. This provides the strong foundation needed for effective operational and strategic decisions. Built on an open-standards data platform, and with built-in financial intelligence and advanced analytics that include over 200 out-of-the-box reports for operational analysis, Cognos 8 Controller rounds out the Cognos performance management solution by making it possible to monitor and manage critical financial reporting, consolidate multiple enterprise views, and perform inter-company elimination. The seamless integration with Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides a single view of all operational and financial data, leveraging rich analytics, to support decision-making requirements...

Best Practices Documented: Cognos Performance Blueprints

To help ensure effective integration of planning and other business processes, and speed deployment of your performance management initiatives, the Cognos Innovation Center has developed Performance Blueprints.

Cognos Performance Blueprints translate some of the best practices that have been used at customer sites into easily implemented solutions that include pre-defined data, process, and policy models. Developed in collaboration with top-performing Cognos customers and performance management experts, the Blueprints address functional and industry-specific processes to help coordinate financial and operational planning, improve forecasting reliability, allocate resources effectively, streamline project implementation schedules, and reduce risk and the cost of ownership.
By linking Cognos Blueprints, you can promote corporate-wide process integration to ensure that strategic objectives, operational plans, people, and activities are aligned, so that you stay on top of performance issues in a fast-changing business environment.

The Performance Manager

"The Performance Manager: Proven Strategies for Turning Information into Higher Business Performance," is a Cognos publication that distills insights and lessons learned from years of experience with thousands of customers into advice for leveraging your information assets to support performance management goals.

The Performance Manager provides invaluable advice on enabling better decision making in all departments – from Finance to Marketing, Sales to IT, Operations to HR – throughout the enterprise.

Reporting as a Catalyst for Performance Management

The Reporting and Performance Management roadmap, outlined in this and the earlier three articles, provides a proven method for implementing a performance management solution using reporting as the catalyst. By following the roadmap, you can put in place an effective reporting solution and then build it along well-thought-out lines to transform your business processes and drive better performance.

Industry-leading Cognos technology and processes are available to help on this journey. Cognos 8 BI, Cognos 8 Planning, and Cognos 8 Controller provide the technology needed to address every phase on the reporting and performance management roadmap. Key best practices made available through the Cognos Performance Blueprints, guidelines for building an effective Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC), Cognos Innovation Center knowledge resources, and Cognos training and support all help turn what could be a perilous journey into one that is easily navigated and ensured of success.

What's more, working with Cognos to help build an effective reporting and performance management solution gives you a partner with over thirty years of industry-leading experience in BI and performance management. With proven, world-class products designed to integrate with your existing enterprise architecture, and best practices to bring Business and IT together to drive success, Cognos helps deliver a full suite of performance management capabilities that includes reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboarding and planning – all designed to turn data into actionable information that drives successful performance.