Cognos boosts Innovation Centre advisory board with addition of Dr David Norton

Cognos, a business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) vendor, recently announced the addition of Dr David P Norton to its Cognos Innovation Centre for Performance Management advisory board.

Dr Norton is a co-founder of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative (BSCol), a Palladium company and president of Palladium Group, a leading professional services firm enabling clients to execute strategy.

Dr Norton`s advisory position will support the Innovation Centre`s new strategy management practice, which adds a second core content pillar to the centre`s existing planning and performance management focus. The new practice will help advance Cognos customers` understanding of strategy management techniques and best-practices with thought leadership materials, executive forums and the application of Cognos` proven, third-generation scorecarding technology, which was designed to help companies better integrate strategy with all the critical performance management processes across the enterprise.

Says David McWilliam, managing director of Cognos SA: "Defining, executing and monitoring strategies is not a dark art, yet proven best-practices and advice from specialists will simplify the process and prove invaluable to our customers. Cognos` Innovation Centre is akin to a `think tank`, providing a knowledge base for customers to draw on to enhance their own competencies around the performance management systems and develop more agile and responsive strategy-focused enterprises."

In collaboration with Dr Norton and our other esteemed advisors, the Cognos Innovation Centre will continue to build a community of like-minded companies, delivering a valued performance management resource for customers that are focused on enhancing planning and strategy management.

Co-author of three world-renowned books on the balanced scorecard, Dr Norton`s most recent title is Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes. His expertise in strategy management and execution will help Cognos` customers integrate strategy with financial and operational planning, organisational and human capital alignment, continuous improvement, business analytics and reporting. The result is an improved ability to execute corporate strategy on a sustainable basis.

In his role as advisor, Dr Norton will participate in one-on-one visioning sessions, executive roundtables and workshops designed to help companies develop a vision and roadmap for sustainable process improvement.

"Nine out of 10 companies fail to execute strategy. Companies recognise that describing corporate strategy and communicating it to everyone in the organisation is necessary but not sufficient," says Dr Norton. "Effectively linking strategy to all the performance management processes on a continuous basis will significantly unlock business value. Technology is imperative to realising this vision. By working with technology leaders such as Cognos, we hope to accelerate the evolution of strategy-focused organisations."

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative research indicates that linking strategy execution to corporate goals and overall performance is a major challenge for many organisations. Research indicates that:

* 67% of HR and IT organisations are not aligned with strategy;
* 85% of exec teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy;
* 60% do not link budgets to strategy;
* 70% of middle managers do not have incentive compensation linked to strategy; and
* On average, 95% of a company`s employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy.

Strategy-focused organisations make strategy a continuous process owned by the entire enterprise - from top management to front-line workers. Many Balanced Scorecard adopters, like Cognos, have taken their groundbreaking tools to the next level by using the scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the centre of key management processes and systems.