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How solid is your performance management platform?

March 24, 2008

Many factors influence your company’s performance. But few are more important than your decision-making ability.

Getting answers and acting on them: that means integrating reporting and analysis, planning, and measuring and monitoring – across the business.

This integration is the hallmark of a performance management system.

How to determine the platform that’s right for your organization? IT considerations can be summarized with three key questions:

• How do I ensure everyone trusts and has the same view of data across the organization?
• How can I scale to support mission-critical deployments and minimize strain on IT?
• How do I gain value from existing investments with the flexibility to respond to new demands?

With the right platform, you can answer these questions.

And you have the capacity to deliver on business needs today and grow your solution as your performance management journey evolves.

Single data view

Modelers need reliable, consistent access to data.

Once data is accessed, data professionals need the freedom to choose the best method to source each data set, mix and match depending on need, and have the flexibility to change approaches as business demands change or as new data sources or data views are required.

The IBM Cognos 8 platform provides consistent access to all data sources with a single query service:

• Broad information reach. Gain access to data wherever it resides using published interfaces across transaction systems, warehouses (relational and OLAP), flat, legacy, or modern sources.
• Flexible data sourcing. A choice of data sourcing strategies – from ETL and EII federation to direct sourcing – to address a range of performance needs and data required by the business.
• Data caching. Optimize performance for end users via EII virtual caching, OLAP PowerCubes, and in-memory caching.
• Single query service. Ensure consistent and predictable queries across all data sources (OLAP and relational).

Consistent information

Data modelers struggle to deliver a consistent set of information across the business community.

They need to free themselves from the demands of having to explain the data, or having to duplicate data for different views or languages.

And they have to ensure everyone gets the right information in a timely way.

IBM Cognos 8 delivers secure and consistent business information:

• Consistent information. Provides a single metadata model, modeled once and deployed anywhere. Publish information to all users for all capabilities.
• Common business model. Apply consistent business rules, dimensions, and calculations to data, regardless of its source.
• Multilingual model. Support multiple languages in one model, to avoid duplication.
• Model once, package for many. Build one model and deliver information in digestible subsets for specific user communities. Users receive only the information relevant to them.
• Data security. Apply security to users or groups and down to granular row and column security. Data governance can be sustained.

Data quality

Data analysts need to engage business domain experts to validate and correct the data.

In this way, they can resolve data quality issues, and business stops questioning the information.

A key success factor to ensuring quality data is engaging the business throughout the process.

“While IT is responsible for getting the raw data, they do not “own” the data contents or are necessarily aware of its context. This is the role of the business.”¹

The IBM Cognos solution ensures data quality:

• Complete data coverage. Using data quality business rules, cleanse all data critical to performance management.
• Profile, parse, and standardize. Uncover and fix data anomalies. Business users identify, quantify, and resolve data quality issues.
• Data quality metrics. Track the health of data over time, the same as any other corporate asset.

Robust data model

Different modelers need to be able to collaborate across the team, ensure there is an enterprise representation of the business, and make sure everyone develops the best possible model that is easy to build, maintain and manage.

The IBM Cognos 8 platform provides capabilities to help data modelers optimize their models and manage change more effectively:

• Model Advisor. Access proven practices and modeling guidelines to identify model inconsistencies and improve model quality.
• Multi-participant modeling. Team members can work on different segments of the model and bring the segments together for a single view.
• Multi-tier modeling. Create separate physical models from business models to decrease the downstream effect of changes.
• Model retargeting. Modify or replace the physical layer of the model with no disruption to end users in the logical layers.
• Impact analysis. Understand the impact of model changes on users and track change details.

Scalable to 160,000 users²

Technology hurdles can dampen enthusiasm for new applications and solutions such as BI and planning.

They can shake business confidence and reduce the user community’s willingness to adopt the solution.

Worse, they can undermine IT’s confidence in the technology.

The technology solution has to meet required service level commitments, provide the right access to all users, and minimize the risk of extra effort and overtime from the IT team.

The IBM Cognos 8 platform scales across the enterprise, providing IT managers with the capacity to plan the required resources for the deployed solution:

• Self-aware, peer-to-peer services. Distributable services that can self-manage, self-spawn, and self-start. Deploy services in a configuration that best fits with the environment and serves the requirements.
• Linear scalability. Services can be scaled-up or scaled-out. Scalability provides predictable linear response to workloads.
• Zero-footprint for end users. No client-side installs, downloads, plug-ins, or need to change user PC settings or configurations. Deploy solutions to a large number of users with minimal deployment effort.
• Comprehensive security. Leverage one or more existing third party or custom security providers to give users seamless single sign-on. Access control, data-level security, full encryption, and application firewall ensures data is only accessed by authorized users and systems.

View system activity

System administrators require visibility into system processes and activity, and capabilities so they can proactively manage the deployment more effectively.

With Cognos, they gain a complete view of BI system activity:

• Task-oriented system monitoring. Gain a consolidated view of all system activity, from scheduled and interactive reports to servers and dispatchers.
• Proactive administration. Monitor system metrics, set thresholds, and monitor them to identify anomalies. Streamline troubleshooting and identify system trends over time to optimize operations.
• Integration with 3rd party EMS. Access metricsfrom EMS solutions such as HP OpenView. Manage BI as part of an overall enterprise administration environment.
• Report re-run. Re-run failed reports on a user’s behalf and restart from the point of failure. Minimize business interruption caused by report issues.
• Queue prioritization. Change the priority of a scheduled report at any time. Optimize delivery of reports to users based on their requests or business demands.

Value from existing investments

When organizations choose new IT applications, IT managers must ensure important technology requirements are addressed.

For one, technology solutions should support broader enterprise standards such as portals, Web, security, operating systems, and more. And they should be flexible enough to fit future requirements.

The solutions also have to be simple – both for users to adopt and for IT to build.

The Cognos architecture ensures environment fit:

• Standards–based. Modern web services-based protocols and standards fit with the evolution to service-oriented architecture, allowing ease of integration and implementation.
• Environment-neutral. Leverage existing heterogeneous platforms, security, portal, and web environments. Have confidence to adopt current infrastructure and adapt as standards evolve.

Fit the preferred infrastructure strategy

IT departments often establish deployment strategies based on optimizing the hardware environment and reducing the cost of operating IT systems.

A solution must be able to adapt to the chosen IT strategy to minimize the cost to deploy.

Cognos offers a flexible infrastructure strategy:

• Location transparency. Deploy any number of services on any number of servers across heterogeneous environments. Services are accessible anywhere.
• Flexible peer-to-peer services. Deploy services co-located or co-resident with other applications or databases to minimize traffic and maximize server usage.

Extend capabilities

To customize and extend capabilities, IT requires full programming access to BI software functionality.

They also want the flexibility to integrate performance management capabilities in other applications or business processes.

Cognos allows IT to extend system functionality:

• Single, open API. Implement new capabilities and custom integrations to address unique or new requirements.
• Purpose-built services. Enhance and add services, data sources, and capabilities. Retain flexibility and keep pace with business demands.
• Embeddable services. Embed BI into applications, business process management, enterprise search, and other business initiatives.

Summary

Having a solid foundation to address today’s requirements and support the performance management journey is critical to ensuring the long-term success of PM implementations.

With the right platform in place, the solution can change and grow as the organization’s needs evolve – whether that be new capabilities, new users, new data sources, new technology environments – all without adding extra burden on IT.

Find Out More Download the white paper: Value from the Cognos BI Platform

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Sources

¹ Jennifer Schmitz and Tom Golden, Data quality: The first metric that matters for performance management success, eBiz.com, January 2, 2008.

² Typical BI day: Scalability testing at the IBM Innovation Center for business partners, January 2008.