OTTAWA, ON, October 8 2002—Faced with a merger that would transform 12 local municipalities into one, the new City of Ottawa's IT department had a major challenge to unite the many data sources from each municipality. The City looked to Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI), to deliver customized reporting and analysis capabilities to employees, providing a single, coordinated view of the new City.

"From an IT perspective, the amalgamation process involved a lot of challenges, including bringing together many separate payroll and human resources systems - a process that would have entailed many months of custom development work to complete," said Greg Geddes, director of IT Services and chief information officer, the City of Ottawa. "With Cognos, we were able to automate many of these processes and saved considerable money and IT resources. Cognos gave us a view of our business operations across all departments, as well as extremely powerful and flexible reporting and analysis capabilities."

Using Cognos, City employees have instant and secure Web-based access to critical business data and can customize reporting. The City's People Services department, which includes social services, public health, and long-term care, uses Cognos BI to better understand and measure performance of the provincially funded Employment and Financial Assistance programs it delivers. City employees can now quickly understand program data and segment client needs and behaviors - all of which are used to build more targeted and customized programs for the public.

"The ability to unite disparate data assets and increase operational efficiencies is a key focus for the public sector," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, global marketing, Cognos. "Cognos delivers the industry's most flexible and powerful business intelligence solution, allowing our public sector customers to leverage their existing technology investments and provide unprecedented insight and analysis capabilities to users across all departments."