Cognos, an IBM company and vendor of business intelligence and performance management solutions, has unveiled new collaborative business modelling software for business users to create, maintain, govern and share business perspectives and quickly organise strategic information for improved decision-making and performance management.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint is a new performance management offering that addresses the increasing globalisation, industry consolidation and data governance challenges today's businesses face. These modern organisations need an intuitive, workflow-oriented business process that lets financial analysts, line and brand managers or data modellers structure their own view of key information and supports the multiple levels of authorisation required to manage business performance across the organisation. These capabilities are essential whether the organisation is determining an effective way to standardise relationships between operating companies, or managing product and customer dimensions and their associated roll-up structures.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint provides the business user with comprehensive dimension management capabilities that helps them maintain collections of business hierarchies and dimensions to yield new insights, easily reach all data, and quickly align both systems and people to the latest view of the business across finance and operations. For example, operations managers might want their sales hierarchies to reflect the latest re-organisation, while financial analysts might want to re-align their cost centres so they have visibility to both the planned and actual views.
The product is complementary to master data management solutions, like IBM InfoSphere MDM Server, which synchronise master data domains such as customers and products across operational and transactional systems enterprise-wide. Specifically designed for performance management, IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint enables business users to manage the constantly changing dimensions that are most important to their business role for a consistent, shared viewpoint on results, operations and strategy. These dimensions could be associated with current or future cross-organisational views of reports, plans or forecasts for business domains such as cost centres, channels or financial assets.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint is built on the IBM Cognos 8 enterprise-class platform. Its modern, SOA architecture provides an open approach to data access so architects can leverage existing standards and business process management solutions. Changes to dimensions can be tracked back through IBM Cognos 8 Planning and IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence so business analysts and system administrators can validate proposed changes and make master dimensions available for reporting, analysis, enterprise planning and dashboards across the entire performance management system.
To address governance and data integrity, IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint centrally stores dimensions to enable a common view across the organisation. It also replaces any manual efforts with reviewable, automated and auditable processes. This lets data stewards or business analysts ensure compliance with organisational and external governance standards. A documented audit trail provides one-click access to data lineage while security features ensure proper version control and management oversight on changes and approvals to maintain system integrity. The workflow also supports collaboration and approvals across multiple sets of users.
"IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint aligns the business to own and operate dimensions on their own terms," says David McWilliam, MD at Cognos SA, an IBM company. "This new addition to our portfolio lets the domain experts work at the speed of the business and powers a more dynamic decision-making process across business functions - whether it is a financial analyst nominating changes to the chart of accounts workflow or a product manager moving consumer products into different business groups and analysing the associated impact."
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint extends the performance management capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 v4. It is a key component of IBM's Information Agenda, a new approach consisting of industry-specific software and consulting services geared to helping customers use information on demand as a strategic asset across their businesses.
Availability:
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint will be available in Q4, 2008.
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Cognos, an IBM company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008.
For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.
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