Cognos, a business intelligence and performance management vendor, has further forged its ongoing relationship with IBM by appointing Steve Lukens, IBM`s global leader of Financial Management (FM) Consulting Services, to the advisory board of the Cognos Innovation Centre for Performance Management.
Lukens is responsible for leading IBM consultants around the world who provide strategy, systems and process assistance to CFOs and finance organisations across all industries. He joins an esteemed group of advisors that guide Cognos and its customers in advancing state-of-the-art performance management practices.
IBM and Cognos have recently strengthened their industry alliance to jointly drive marketplace innovation and help more enterprise customers succeed with their business intelligence and performance management initiatives. Lukens recently shared his insights on key trends in performance management during an executive panel with Cognos CEO Rob Ashe at Cognos Forum, the company`s annual customer conference.
Lukens has spent 24 years at PriceWaterhouse, PwC Consulting and IBM providing operational improvement assistance, process redesign and change management services to a variety of multinational, multibillion-dollar companies. His expertise and main focus is on improving the finance function within these companies.
"CFOs are facing a transformation imperative as they work to strike a balance between effectiveness, control and efficiency while managing complexity, supporting profitable growth and balancing risk," says Lukens. "Our implementation expertise and Cognos` performance management solutions help CFOs face this challenge and win. I`m pleased to be working with the Cognos Innovation Centre representing IBM in an advisor role to help more companies accelerate innovation and responsiveness as they progress business performance management across their enterprise."
In his role as advisor, Lukens will participate in one-on-one vision sessions, executive roundtables, and workshops designed to help companies understand the opportunity for performance improvement and develop a vision and roadmap using industry best-practices for sustainable process improvement.
Says Gerrardt le Roux, SI Alliances Manager at Cognos SA: "Working closely with IBM and its offerings are delivering significant benefits to customers including leveraging best practices from both vendors, optimising their analytics applications and integrating business processes across the enterprise to obtain greater insight into business performance. Lukens` contribution to the Cognos Innovation Advisory Centre will further add value to both vendor`s customers and demonstrates the ongoing commitment to delivering best practices."
The combined Cognos and IBM Financial Management Consulting Services offerings help companies realise the promise of performance management by aligning top-to-bottom business objectives and metrics, increasing visibility into business activities and IT resources, providing access to and analysis of real-time and historical information from multiple sources, modelling and monitoring of business processes to improve effectiveness, supplying role-based views and collaboration to initiate actions based on insights, and providing IT management systems that enable controlled environments.
Cognos Innovation Centre advisors also include Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Research Director, Jeremy Hope; The Hackett Group`s Chief Research Officer, Richard T Roth; President of Palladium Group and Co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard, Dr David P Norton; and Sonax Founder and President, David Axson.
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The Cognos Innovation Centre was established in June 2004 to advance the understanding of proven performance management best-practices and enabling technologies. Staffed by experts in planning, management processes, and technology, the Innovation Centre partners with more than 500 Cognos customers, partners, academics, industry leaders, and others who want to accelerate adoption, reduce risk, and maximise the impact of technology-enabled performance management practices. Depending on their area of interest, members focus on advancing performance management practices or business intelligence competency, gaining insights from experts and peers who have experienced similar challenges and paths to success. Visit http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/.
Cognos
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.
Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organisation`s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? - and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.
Cognos serves more than 23 000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3 000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.
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