Central Government UK

Departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental bodies are all facing a common challenge to improve their performance. Particular pressures now come from:

  • Capabilty Reviews into leadership, strategy and delivery, including the new Procurement Capability reviews
  • Efficiency Programmes, with Gershon targets on value for money, civil service posts and location
  • Comprehensive Spending Review 07 settlements
  • Service Delivery to the public, building on the Transformational Government agenda
  • New Corporatism demanding more effective working across organisational boundaries
  • Raising Professionalism in all spheres
  • Sustainability in policy and operations.

Cognos Performance Management is a targeted set of techniques which can quickly strengthen central government’s ability to respond to these challenges. Developed and proven over two decades, Cognos solutions help leaders and managers take better strategic and operational decisions, and improve their organisation’s capability to handle new or unforeseen events.

They do this by introducing a step change in the way organisational data is turned in to information on which critical decisions can be based. Major benefits to central government include:

  • Gathering, combining and analysing data from right across the organisation, and then converting it swiftly to simple, meaningful business information. New light is thrown on activities ranging from public sector service delivery through to internal operational efficiencies.
  • Structuring business plans and budgets so that real time developments—new Ministerial requirements, unexpected changes in activity levels, slower project progress—can be factored in to reveal impacts on existing plans.
  • Providing leaders with balanced information on critical performance issues, ensuring adverse and favourable movement is spotted early on, and a balanced range of strategic indicators is being monitored regularly and transparently.

By simplifying the supply of information, and streamlining the planning and budgeting cycle, our clients have made significant value for money savings in both time and resource. Staff face less of the drudgery of data manipulation, and have more time to analyse the meaning of the results, adding value and insight, as well as increasing job interest. Cognos technology uses open standards, is available off the shelf, and is fully compatible with all popular central government IT systems.