Cognos, Fuentez Systems help US military, government agencies deal with post-attack pressures

Government agencies and military organisations have been navigating a new set of challenges brought on by the 11 September terrorist attacks on North America. Today, military and government agencies have an even more pressing need to closely manage materiel, assets and personnel; to get information into the right hands of quickly; and to make the best use of that information.

Using technology from Cognos, global provider of business intelligence solutions, Fuentez Systems Concepts has been able to deploy comprehensive decision support systems for organisations like the US Coast Guard.

A long-standing solutions and consulting partner to the US Navy and US Air Force, Fuentez Systems Concept, based in Charleston, SC, helps organisations like the US Coast Guard manage internal information to assist with critical decision-making around personnel deployment, resource allocation, logistics support and risk management.

"The world has irrevocably changed. Public sector and military organisations are placing the highest-level priority on technologies and best practices that enable the mission-critical use of information," says Ed Waizenegger, Systems Engineering and Technical Services at the US Coast Guard and a consultant with Fuentez.

"Cognos, with its new technology Cognos Series 7, is taking a significant step forward in helping the public sector bring just-in-time information to personnel anytime, anywhere. Cognos NoticeCast technology delivers specialised, narrowcast analyses and reports to the people who need them via wireless devices."

Most importantly, the critical interplay of the robust Cognos analysis and Cognos event alerting forms a powerful dual weapon for many public sector and military organisations. Key areas like personnel and equipment availability have taken on mission-critical importance. Cognos Series blends narrowcast, agent-based alerting into the powerful Cognos BI framework, enabling organisations to stay apprised of information `events` as they happen by alerting against the operational data.

"In some of our customer environments, Cognos analysis has already informed the critical business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that we need to most closely track. With this foundation in place, Cognos NoticeCast completes the equation sending critical information out to the individuals who can best act on this intelligence. Cognos Series 7 also place a high degree of emphasis on providing the best centralised security in the business intelligence market," adds Waizenegger.

"The launch of Cognos Series 7 is a clear demonstration of the Cognos commitment to providing some of the largest, most innovative and important organisations in the world with `no compromise` business intelligence functionality. Cognos Series 7 has been designed and tested with the mission-critical environments of these organisations in mind," says Peter Griffiths, vice president of research and development, Cognos.