IBM Cognos Metrics Manager

Fact Sheet


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MANAGE WHAT MATTERS

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager is a scorecarding application for creating, managing, and presenting your company's critical metrics. It lets you create an effective performance management system that links decisions, tactics, and accountability to goals and strategy.

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager provides individual employees, managers, and executives with a single source of current and past enterprise performance metrics that are directly linked to your organization's strategic goals.

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager increases visibility into your company's key value drivers and the way they interact. Strategy maps help people align their decisions with strategy. Ownership for each metric is clearly defined, for greater accountability. Decision-makers can access and manipulate their scorecards and supporting information instantly, without the need for IT intervention.

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager can draw data from anywhere in your organization, in any format. And it can model and track any set of performance indicators for Global 3500 enterprises.

With IBM Cognos Metrics Manager, users are self-sufficient, and can readily see how the business is progressing against its strategy. They can set priorities for their own actions. They can understand how their decisions affect the company's performance.

This scorecarding approach lets you monitor your business performance by tracking more than just financial measurements. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as employee satisfaction, supplier performance, and customer profitability, can be integrated into your management picture. These indicators draw on a broad range of data sources from many different areas of your business.

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager delivers the single version of the truth that your organization needs to make decisions with confidence. It also provides the direct link to business intelligence (BI) that helps users get at what's driving their performance. IBM Cognos Metrics Manager is tightly integrated with Cognos BI to provide the rich environment and extensive range of Cognos functionality, including dashboards, reports, and analysis.

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager works with the Cognos Enterprise Planning Series. You can have visibility into plan versus actual performance and communicate goal-driven planning metrics to thousands of employees across your organization.

This integration creates a collaborative decision-making environment for business users. It enables the effective sharing and rapid distribution of information tied to key corporate performance management indicators.

KEY BUSINESS BENEFITS

Flexible, open methodology support
The flexibility of the software lets you model metrics and their relationship to each other based on any standard or proprietary scorecarding and management methodology you already use.

Summary views from an easy-to-use interface
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager displays summary views based on the Balanced Scorecard and other methodologies, and users can easily drill down to detailed metrics results and history.

Analyze issues to the required depth
The rich Cognos scorecarding environment, through integration with Cognos reporting and analysis capabilities, lets you analyze performance issues to understand what drives a metric's change in order to make better decisions. Choose between a report or a live custom URL for further information or greater context. URLs can point toward live dashboards, BI reports, SCM or CRM systems, or Web sites.

Flexible information delivery
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager, in conjunction with IBM Cognos NoticeCast™, lets users be notified by email at their desktop or on their PDA when a metric changes status. They can show or hide information and add custom benchmarks to their own personal scorecards. Detailed view of accountability and performance Managers can view metrics by their owners for a better view of individuals' performance. Three- or five-state status indicators provide more granularity and show when performance is approaching or slightly exceeding targets.

Work online or offline
View your scorecards from any Web browser or generate PDF files that you can print and share in hard copy.

Combined views of disparate measures
Recognizing that many users require cross-functional metrics, IBM Cognos Metrics Manager uniquely consolidates disparate measures from different functional areas and data sources.

KEY TECHNICAL FEATURES

Metrics definition from disparate data sources
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager can import and provide data to populate and support your scorecard from any source, including Cognos BI sources, Excel spreadsheets, flat files, user-entered values, and third-party databases. The IBM Cognos Metrics Designer component vastly simplifies the creation of scorecarding applications from existing data. It simplifies the building, automation, and deployment of large scorecarding implementations. Users can design and load their IBM Cognos Metrics Manager application from a relational or dimensional source via IQDs, data cubes, and IBM Cognos Framework Manager models.

Easy to deploy
Zero-footprint architecture means users and administrators do not require software installed on their desktop, making global intranet or extranet use and deployment easier.

Simplified metrics creation
Administrators can define a metric once for use in any scorecard in their organization. Centrally defined KPIs ensure a consistent version of the truth and priority for all users. Administrator menus let you define all aspects of a metric: threshold ranges, benchmarks, data source definition, contact names, and URL links for contextual information in any format.

Flexible metrics building
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager lets you control the specific metrics or KPIs you wish to track, how they are combined, what constitutes good and poor performance for each indicator, and links to supporting reports.

Central metrics store
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager historical data, as well as scorecard, diagrams, and metric definitions are maintained in an industry-standard relational database. Cognos product interoperability IBM Cognos Metrics Manager is interoperable with the Cognos BI framework and full suite of BI tools, and is integrated with Cognos Web Services.

Application access and security
Integration with the Cognos access and security foundation means users are easily assigned to classes, which determine the scorecards and metrics they can access through a simple and single sign-on dialogue box.

Embedded business intelligence tools
Business user tools simplify cross-impact analysis of metrics. Easy-to-use multidimensional analysis tools let them uncover the root cause of performance issues.

Metrics relationship auto-diagrams
Automatically generated HTML displays of the relationship between metrics visually guide analysis to the root of performance problems.

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative-certified
Certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, IBM Cognos Metrics Manager includes Strategy Maps and other Kaplan & Norton Balanced Scorecard best practices that can be easily and quickly modeled through menu-based administrator functions.

Dynamic strategy maps
View metrics in relation to strategy by placing them on images (e.g., revenue maps, corporate strategy maps, floor diagrams, or process maps). These diagrams can be easily created using the drag-and-drop administration interface to place metrics on top of pre-defined images.

Utilization monitoring and analysis
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager can track its own performance. It allows administrators to analyze how the application is being utilized throughout the organization.

Scalability
IBM Cognos Metrics Manager was built to handle the data volumes and user requirements of Fortune 1000 companies.

COGNOS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: BI FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE

Cognos business intelligence delivers the information framework that lets anyone in your organization understand your corporate performance-from any angle and to any depth. It lets you communicate the results-whether business as usual or breakthrough insight. It can even notify you if a critical event occurs, wherever you may be. Build a solution using Cognos BI components or purchase a pre-built solution. Either way, ease of use and deployment, combined with user self-service, means you're up and running quickly and seeing ROI faster than you imagined. All Cognos BI components feature:

Centralized security: A single LDAP-based component delivers seamless, secure access for all users inside and outside the firewall in conjunction with your own user authentication and security systems. IT can manage user profiles and classes for all Cognos components through centralized SSL security.

Zero-footprint Web deployment: Users access information in pure HTML using their Web browser, making Java applets or proprietary plug-ins unnecessary. Share strategic information over a secure extranet with partners, suppliers, customers, and a mobile sales force with the bandwidth-saving benefit of a stateless environment.

Scalability: Cognos BI has been tested and proven scalable to tens of thousands of users through load balancing and a distributed architecture supporting Unix and Windows. Central administration: Manage all BI applications from one central console, or distribute management among departments or locations. Control request processing at the server, application, PowerCube, and report level. Monitor throughput across multiple servers at a glance and fine-tune multi-server environments. The platform-independent, remote Java administrator program lets you administer any server from any machine.

Shared metadata: Create and manage all BI metadata and business rules in a single metadata model based on shared dimensions. This model provides a consistent enterprise data view with minimum development effort. The SQL-based environment ensures the metadata is optimized for each BI application.

Extensible BI: Using our open API based on a Web services architecture, IT can integrate BI directly into third party portals or specialized Web applications. The software's shared data foundation and integrated, modular approach means it can be easily implemented in steps across the entire enterprise. It can grow as the business grows, while reusing existing technology investments to save on costs.

Local language, local currency: Localized product versions let users work in their own language and view figures in their own currency, using regional settings-all from a single application server.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

IBM Cognos Metrics Manager is built on industry-leading enterprise architectures including:

  • Multiple Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AiX),
  • Multiple Application Servers (Sun One 7, Apache Tomcat 4.1.18, IBM Websphere, 5, BEA Weblogic 7.0.1 and 8.1)
  • Enterprise RDBMS Repository (MS-SQL Server, IBM-DB2, Oracle),
  • J2EE Application Servers,
  • Browser IE V5.5 and higher (for users or administrators), or Netscape 6.2 (for users).