Business Intelligence firm Cognos has implemented a business management and measurement solution, for the city of Cape Town`s Community Development Programme, aimed at providing a powerful solution to organise and give critical insight into the mountain of public data residing in the programme`s various databases.
In the past, Cape Town had no effective way of working with dissemination of a single version of the data. Previous processes were inflexible and labour-intensive, falling short of the efficient report writing and analysis capabilities users required.
Chris O`Connor, Manager of Admin and Finance, Community Development, City of Cape Town, comments: "The city needed a sophisticated, efficient method of viewing all the data stored in its systems. The solution provided by Cognos has given the city insight into a world where better decision-making would be feasible, and for ratepayers, this should imply a more equitable distribution of facilities and services."
The City deployed an Information Unification Architecture to take over a hundred data sources and unify them into Cognos Visualizer, which allows large amounts of data from one or many sources to be combined into a succinct visual report and virtual rooms.
Says O`Connor: "Cognos Visualizer leverages human visual perception, enabling users to see large amounts of data with multiple data dimensions, or data with a strong geographical element. "This allows users to turn data into tangible information."
The Cognos solution provided Cape Town with a comprehensive, flexible business intelligence solution that is capable of meeting the varied reporting and analysis needs of employees across all silos. By extracting critical intelligence from the vast amounts of aggregated data, public sector employees are able to streamline internal business processes and make better, more informed decisions that affect both businesses and city residents.
He explains: "The city is managed in health districts, through the information provided by the Cognos solution, we could paint a picture of living conditions in Nyanga for example, and see that it was being managed erroneously as an informal settlement area, resulting in funds not being allocated appropriately.
"Additionally, we were able to view the vast amount of data supporting controversial issues such as crime, HIV/AIDS and teen pregnancy statistics, which can then be used to identify trends and informing the general public," says O`Connor. "In addition, together with the city`s institutional knowledge, from the first delivery of the Information Unification Architecture, the software highlights the lack of improvement in certain key management indicators, and allows us to categorise data differently, and to see the changes over time."
Cognos is quickly becoming a strategic element of the Cape Town`s everyday business processes. "Using Visualizer, we can drill down into the mountains of data and statistics accumulated, and see the detail behind the charts and graphs. This allows us to view vast amounts of information in a visual format, like a chart or a map, react quicker and make informed decisions for the betterment of the people of Cape Town," concludes O`Connor.
Share
Cognos is the world`s largest and most successful vendor of enterprise business intelligence solutions that leverage Internet technology to make information easily accessible to everyone in your enterprise. Founded in 1969, Cognos does business in more than 120 countries and employs some 2 600 people worldwide. With more than 2 million BI licences in over 16 000 organisations worldwide, Cognos solutions are licensed for use by a wide range of customers, including Global 3000 corporations.
Our business intelligence solutions and services are sold directly and are also available from more than 3 000 worldwide partners and resellers and supported by an experienced field force of more than 1 400 customer-facing personnel. For more information, visit: http://www.cognos.com.
Editorial contacts