Cognos

MANAGE WHAT MATTERS.

COGNOS METRICS

MANAGER: THE NEXT

GENERATION OF

SCORECARDING

TECHNOLOGY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

MANAGING PERFORMANCE WITH SCORECARDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Aligning company strategy and behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Driving company communication, integration, and alignment . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Responding to performance results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

ACHIEVING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

WITH COGNOS METRICS MANAGER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

HOW COGNOS METRICS MANAGER ADDRESSES

THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Align company strategy and behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Drive company communication, integration, and alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Respond to performance results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

COGNOS METRICS MANAGER KEY FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY . . . . . . . . 13

Built for business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Built for IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Technical Specifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

ABOUT COGNOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

ABSTRACT

MANAGE WHAT MATTERS. COGNOS METRICS MANAGER:

THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCORECARDING TECHNOLOGY

2

This white paper will demonstrate how next-generation

scorecarding technology will help organizations not

only survive, but improve their performance in a

challenging economy. Cognos® Metrics Manager is a

performance management system shift from the simple

performance measurement with existing scorecarding

software to the realm of performance management.

Cognos Metrics Manager enables the enterprise to com-

municate and align their human capital with corporate

strategies, their associated tactics, key performance

indicators (targets & results), accountabilities and

underlying business intelligence resources in order

to take focused action to adjust and improve overall

performance.

Cognos Metrics Manager goes beyond static presenta-

tions of limited data to provide a common performance

management system based on current and historically

tracked metrics. Decision-makers at all levels of the

enterprise can navigate performance problems, discover

the cause through guided analysis, collaborate on the

solution, and make better business decisions every day.

Cognos Metrics Manager enables organizations to

make effective decisions quickly and simply. As such, it

further fulfills the Cognos vision—to help organizations

apply business intelligence strategically to optimize

corporate performance management (CPM).

“For too long, BI has been forced into a strong but

tangential relationship to measuring, monitoring,

and managing the business. Cognos Metrics

Manager now allows BI to take a central position in

business decisions—a role that can enable the entire

enterprise to systematically enact the will of man-

agement.”

Bob Moran, Aberdeen Group

At the start of each business day, organizations face any

number of challenges: to drive innovation, to launch

new products, to improve product quality, to create

more value for their customers, to develop new

markets, to strategically manage human capital, and

ultimately, to increase shareholder value.

The entire employee base in an organization must make

the decisions that respond to these strategic challenges.

And they must make these decisions in a business

climate driven by sudden economic or market shifts.

Historically, the metrics that have been used to support

these decisions have been financial. Yet a complex

business climate demands information that goes beyond

financial metrics. It demands forward-looking, or

“leading” metrics that can be integrated into a compre-

hensive performance management environment that can

drive future value.

Until now, it has been difficult for companies to move

beyond financial metrics to a performance management

environment. One of the biggest challenges has been

consolidating corporate performance data from disparate

sources into centralized, coherent, and meaningful

metrics system that they can trust—one version of the

“truth.” Many companies rely on performance data

drawn from many different systems: ERP, CRM, finan-

cial spreadsheets, flat data files, data marts, presentation

software, and other sources. Each system provides

important information about a particular aspect of the

company’s performance, but each collects, defines, and

displays the information in a different way.

Decision-makers devote great amounts of time, energy,

and resources trying to consolidate this data to under-

stand and report on their performance. What they

often discover in doing this is that their peers have

consolidated the data in different ways, each accord-

ing to their own interpretation of the strategy. Metrics

are incomplete, conflicting, or limited to a particular

department or function. Sometimes they are all three.

Other than key financial metrics (which are well-

known and well-defined), decision-makers struggle to

obtain a consolidated understanding of performance

against corporate strategies and targets.

In these situations, decision-makers often spend more

time discussing the validity of numbers than solving per-

formance issues. Without a performance management

system that provides a single, unified and consistently

defined view of their performance, decision-makers have

a great deal of difficulty understanding how the

company is performing and have little opportunity to

collaborate for effective decision-making.

INTRODUCTION



3

Scorecards have been the foundation that enables an

organization to translate its strategy into specific, meas-

urable objectives that can be consistently defined,

applied, understood, and communicated across all areas

of the company. They meet the need for decision-

makers to share a common understanding of the

processes and actions that drive an organization and

provide a single source of metrics and targets that

measure organizational performance against strategic

goals and objectives. Scorecard initiatives can support a

broader performance management or quality control

methodology within a specific department, division, or

across an entire enterprise.

One of the most popular management methodologies is

the Balanced Scorecard, introduced in 1992 by Drs.

Robert Kaplan and David Norton.1 Kaplan and Norton

asserted that a company’s financial metrics reflected the

cumulative effects of only a small proportion of the

decisions made within that company, and that its true

value could be more accurately evaluated and increased

by measuring the effect of decisions made at every level

and throughout the company. They asserted that it was in

the interplay of people, processes, and other intangible

assets that the next competitive advantage was to be

found. To understand, measure, and leverage the value

of this new competitive advantage, they envisioned a

new class of metrics that would quantify the value

created by the many processes that take place within

and across an organization.

One well-known quality control methodology is Six

Sigma. Other quality control methodologies include

Total Quality Management (TQM), certification under

the International Standards Organization (ISO), and the

Baldridge Awards.

Existing scorecarding technology no longer meets the

constantly evolving and fluid nature of today’s business

climate. Most existing scorecard solutions are hard-

wired to ERP systems and require extensive coding to

change. This makes them of little use when the

company needs to change priorities quickly in response

to changing market conditions or performance issues

and measure its performance using new metrics or

against new benchmarks. Also, existing scorecard soft-

ware consists primarily of static HTML pages and

usually offer only limited BI capabilities. These solu-

tions may indicate that performance is off track, but

they cannot provide any insight into why or facilitate

focused action at the point of maximum impact.

Technology advancements have set the stage for a wide-

scale adoption of performance management systems—

next-generation scorecarding software that can be

integrated into the wider context of corporate perform-

ance management (CPM). This software will allow

users to discover which of their metrics are on or off

track, why they are that way, and what can be done

about them.

There is a critical need for next-generation scorecarding

software. According to a recent survey, fewer than 35

per cent of high-level decision-makers said they base

their decisions on their own corporate data. At the same

time, 60 per cent of those same people surveyed said

that they count on technology to help them make faster

decisions and to increase co-ordination around the

decision-making process.2

MANAGING PERFORMANCE WITH SCORECARDS



4

1 Harvard Business Review. The Balanced Scorecard: Measures that DrivePerformance, January-February 1992.

2 Rob Rose, Smooth Sailing on Rough Seas, Cognos Press, 2002.

ALIGNING COMPANY STRATEGY AND BEHAVIOR

A successful strategy is one that can be made relevant to

everyone within an organization. But a common problem

that many organizations face is the inherent difficulty in

linking their strategy, people, and performance through a

unified metrics framework. Unfortunately, this is a

problem whose size and complexity grows in tandem

with the organization: the larger or more geographically

diverse the company, the greater the gap between strategy

and execution.

This problem can occur when a company has agreed on

a workable strategy but is having difficulty cleanly

communicating desired behavior. Or, it has a workable

strategy and clearly defined goals, but lacks the metrics

around which people can measure their performance

against them.

DRIVING COMPANY COMMUNICATION,

INTEGRATION, AND ALIGNMENT

A second core problem for many organizations is the

difficulty they face in combining their disparate data

assets into a single reference point. In most cases, an

organization will base its decisions on Key Performance

Indicators (KPIs) that draw data from different sources:

ERP systems, financial spreadsheets, CRM software,

and others. Not only do these different systems report

on performance in different areas, the data they collect

may not be collected, shared or defined in a consistent

way across the company. This creates a disconnect

where there should be unity.

In this situation, there is no single system around which

organizations can align and communicate performance

results and actions. Without a shared performance man-

agement system with an agreed-to set of metrics, each

department may suggest different priorities or provide

different answers to the same question. For example:

falling revenue from a particular vertical market may

lead to widely divergent views on the best course of

action: better training for the sales team, hiring more

sales people; improving marketing, developing a new

product, or discounting the current product.

This problem can also arise when a company lacks a

standardized, commonly agreed-upon definition of its

key reports, or when a particular metric is measured in

different ways across the company. Different managers

may use different metrics. Its executives use different

key reports that may measure things related to the cor-

porate strategy, but their relative importance and their

relationship to other reports is not centrally defined.

The company is unable to measure its effectiveness

against the overall strategy and there is no alignment of

tactics with strategy.

In the age of mergers, acquisitions, and global competi-

tion, this is a common problem. In Using the Balanced

Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Kaplan

and Norton describe how executives at a then-recently

merged bank agreed “to provide superior service to

targeted customers,” only to find out later that each of

its 25 senior executives had a different definition of

“superior service” and a different image of “targeted

customers.”3

THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS



5

3 Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Kaplan andNorton, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1996.

RESPONDING TO PERFORMANCE RESULTS

A third problem occurs primarily when companies try

to respond to severe, abrupt, or unexpected changes in

market conditions using traditional, scorecards that

may be hard-wired to an ERP system or some other

data source that requires extensive programming inter-

vention to change.

Should a company need to change its priorities—for

example, from margins to customer service, or from

acquisitions to cost-reductions, it will need to make

operational changes within and across each functional

area. Quite often, these changes tend to be short-term;

as such, companies need to quickly understand how its

processes operate and how they need to be altered. A

company in this situation also needs metrics that can be

updated frequently to let its decision-makers evaluate

and re-evaluate their progress against new priorities at

a faster pace. The company’s performance management

system needs to support these shifts in performance

focus without needing to be re-wired.

The longer the company spends figuring out how it

works and how to evaluate its performance, the more

serious the problem becomes, the more momentum it

loses, and the more difficult it becomes to take corrective

action. Standard financial metrics are indicators of past

events. They cannot explain or predict how a perform-

ance change in one area affects performance or outcomes

in another.

Each of these problems should be familiar to most

organizations, as they are well-documented in the

business press. In addition, it is not uncommon for

organizations to be dealing with each problem at the

same time. Each scenario illustrates a different aspect of

the deficiencies of traditional metrics in responding to

the challenges of the modern business climate.



6

Cognos Metrics Manager is a next-generation tech-

nology for creating, managing, presenting, and delivering

an organization’s critical metrics. It enables organizations

to create an effective performance management system

that links execution and accountability to goals and

strategy, letting them monitor, analyze, manage, and

report key performance metrics at every level of the

business. As such, it extends Cognos’ ability to help

organizations apply business intelligence strategically

across the enterprise to optimize corporate performance

management.

Through an easy-to-use interface, Cognos Metrics

Manager provides all enterprise managers with a single

source of current and past enterprise performance

metrics, measures, and information through which they

can manage and collaborate on performance issues.

It provides business performance navigation—not

just scorecard navigation—and supports any business

performance or quality methodology requirement.

Scorecard view at a glance

Users can readily see how the business is progressing

against its strategy, set priorities for their actions, and

understand how their decisions affect the company’s

performance.

Balanced scorecard strategy map

Cognos Metrics Manager displays a company’s progress

against its corporate strategy in easy-to-understand

formats such as traffic light indicators, directional

arrows, or numerical scores. This lets managers see at a

glance which metrics need their immediate attention.

Users across the organization can quickly see which key

areas are performing well, which ones are not, and can

focus their time and energy where it matters most. They

become self-sufficient, able to access the metrics they are

accountable for.



7

ACHIEVING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WITH COGNOS METRICS MANAGER

Cognos Metrics Manager lets companies monitor any

number of KPIs at one time. If one of the KPIs goes

outside the defined range, then the decision-maker can

take immediate action. They can access related business

intelligence sources and reports to analyze the underlying

causes, and link up with others to collaborate on the

performance issue.

Tightly integrated within the Cognos BI framework and

Cognos Analytic Applications, Cognos Metrics Manager

is supported by an application architecture and business

intelligence layer with reporting and analysis, finance

and planning, and data warehouse applications.

Cognos Metrics Manager also works with Cognos

Planning Series. Organizations can provide visibility

into plan versus actual performance and communicate

goal-driven planning metrics to thousands of employees

across the enterprise. Cognos Metrics Manager can

draw data from anywhere in your organization, in any

format. This integration creates a truly collaborative de-

cision-making environment for business users, enabling

both the effective sharing and rapid distribution of in-

formation tied to key corporate performance indicators.

Integrated analysis

Cognos Metrics Manager is also a browser-based appli-

cation. This provides benefits to both end-users and IT

departments. It means end-users are not required to

download or install additional software, and it means

that IT departments can deploy it easily across an

enterprise without needing to devote large numbers of

resources to keep it running smoothly.



8

ALIGN COMPANY STRATEGY AND BEHAVIOR

Cognos Metrics Manager presents the metrics that

guide key business decisions in a format that accurately

reflects the complex environment in which decision-

makers operate. This is done through strategy maps,

dynamic impact analysis diagrams, and tools for guided

analysis and collaboration. Cognos Metrics Manager

also enables managers to prioritize and rank individual

performance metrics according to a company’s current

performance focus.

Align metrics with strategy and initiatives

As a performance management environment, Cognos

Metrics Manager can link all employees accountable

for key performance goals to the high-level strategies

through a complete set of commonly agreed-to metrics.

These key metrics can be tracked over time to catch

performance issues and to provide a single source of

results upon which critical corporate performance

decisions can be made. Such a scorecard can articulate

to everyone in an organization exactly how the organi-

zation is performing and how people need to react to

support the corporate strategy. Decision-makers can

identify and act at the point of maximum impact with

complete information and facts rather than relying on

“gut feel” or a possibly incomplete understanding.

In this way, Cognos Metrics Manager supports an

organization’s efforts to create a performance-oriented

culture.

More specifically, it allows decision-makers to monitor

Key Performance Indicators in their area and helps

them understand how a change that has occurred in one

KPI is affecting performance in another. From here, the

user can navigate an impact analysis diagram to find

the root cause of the change, explore all related reports,

conduct multidimensional analysis of current and past

results for a deeper understanding of the issue, and then

take the appropriate action. By using these features,

decision-makers can understand and predict how the

decisions they make support the overall strategy and

how their own performance affects that of the overall

organization. And because of the dynamic nature of

Cognos Metrics Manager, they can see the results of

their decisions in near real time.



9

HOW COGNOS METRICS MANAGER ADDRESSES THREE CORE BUSINESS PROBLEMS

“Staying on top of the factors that drive our business is

critical in this tumultuous economic environment.

Cognos Metrics Manager is easy to use and powerful

enough to provide the scorecarding solution we

need to manage business performance across our

company.”

Harry Hixson, Senior Vice President of Information

Technology, CTX Mortgage Company



10

DRIVE COMPANY COMMUNICATION,

INTEGRATION, AND ALIGNMENT

Cognos Metrics Manager supports collaborative decision-

making around a common view of a company’s strategy;

that is, one set of metrics that the organization has agreed

to define and measure in a consistent manner across its

entire operation. It enables organizations to select, define,

and share the KPIs that measure their progress against

their stated corporate strategy. Metrics can be configured

to draw data from the source that best articulates per-

formance against the strategy. The executive team, or a

business analyst, can define the metric—the contributing

elements, the inter-relationships, and the thresholds—

easily, from the desktop. Metrics can change with the

business requirements, with the software automatically

providing context to help the user understand them, such

as reports, numbers, or other metrics. The metrics can be

shared with all users, as defined in security and adminis-

tration. In this way, the organization has one version of

the truth (their strategic goals); the means to measure

progress against it (the metrics); and the way to commu-

nicate that progress out to all staff to guide their activity

(the shared scorecard).

The corporate strategy that is created in the boardroom

is shared, and decision-makers at every level understand

how and why the company is performing the way it is

because they are all operating with metrics from the

same source. This allows companies to flexibly adjust

their strategy over time in response to results that are

displayed and analyzed through Cognos Metrics

Manager. The openness of this approach means that

companies can empower employees with responsibilities

for a metric and users can manage the responsibility

effectively. They can see how they are performing, under-

stand the root causes for changes in performance, and

how to improve it.

RESPOND TO PERFORMANCE RESULTS

How can organizations, particularly those with lines of

business and physical assets spread across different

markets and countries, effectively set new priorities and

change strategic direction? More importantly, how does

an organization make these changes without losing

momentum? Cognos Metrics Manager enables this by

providing a performance management environment that

lets all corporate decision-makers effect business

changes on the fly with accurate and up-to-date infor-

mation, quickly and easily. The openness and flexibility

built in to Cognos Metrics Manager are key to enabling

organizations to quickly redirect a course of action in

response to performance results or market changes.

Cognos Metrics Manager lets companies create a

performance management environment that supports

their corporate goals. It achieves this by supporting a

source of consistently defined and calculated metrics—

one version of the truth. Performance management

operates on the principle that a strategy with a well-

defined set of corporate objectives and associated

metrics are what is important to focus on and to give an

enterprise the competitive advantage in their market.

Cognos Metrics Manager is the first technology to

make this principle a reality.

Corporate Performance Management (CPM)—a

framework that helps companies drive, monitor, and

understand their performance at the enterprise level—

rests on three integrated capabilities:

Enterprise Scorecarding tracks performance against

your strategic plans, and monitors the key metrics of

day-to-day operations.

Enterprise Planning turns corporate goals into concrete

plans and budgets that communicate a common

purpose throughout the organization.

Enterprise Business Intelligence turns data into mean-

ingful reports and analysis to make better decisions.

Only Cognos delivers these three integrated capabilities.

Choose one vendor with confidence, knowing the entire

range of software to support your efforts is available,

flexible, and scalable as your requirements evolve.

In Smooth Sailing on Rough Seas, Rob Rose, VP of

Strategy and Business Development for Cognos,

examines how distributed decision-making based on

business intelligence metrics can impact corporate

performance. Much of Rose’s thinking and insights

centre on the well-documented disconnect between

planning and execution that is common in many organ-

izations, and the need for a performance management

environment that can bridge this gap and propel a

business toward higher performance.

Rose states that corporate agility will be the overriding

imperative for success in a turbulent economy, and that

a company must reconsider the importance of all

decision-makers as owners of business performance—

from executives to line of business managers and

knowledge workers. For many organizations, this

means undergoing a fundamental change in their

decision-making culture. It means focusing attention

and leveraging the ways in which a company creates

value in the long-term, rather than simply focusing on

reducing head counts or divesting itself of physical

assets to survive in the short term. This idea lies at the

heart of corporate performance management (CPM).

Scorecarding is an entry point, or an on-ramp to CPM.

From the experiences of high-performance companies,

Rose distilled eight simple, yet foundational principles

that, when understood and practiced by committed

executives, their management teams and employees—

and supported by the right business intelligence tech-

nologies—can be the catalyst for breakthrough

performance that goes beyond incremental continuous

improvement.

CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE



11

“[Cognos] Metrics Manager is more than a scorecard’s

red, yellow, and green lights. It is an innovative and im-

portant component of any firm’s Enterprise Performance

Management (EPM) architecture that administers Key

Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter, and is the

entry point for executives and managers to manage the

business using active data analysis.”

Source: John Hagerty, Vice President and General Manager,

The AMR Research Alert, Cognos Adds Important EPM

Component With Metrics Manager, October 09, 2002

The eight principles are:

1. Enlist decision-makers across the organization, pro-

viding everyone with a shared, holistic view into the

company’s overall strategy, and a clear understanding

of how their role impacts overall performance.

2. Create a foundation for collaboration and enlight-

ened decision-making, based on a common, consis-

tent context.

3. Empower people to make decisions at their point of

maximum impact, to accelerate the speed of effective

decision-making.

4. Build a shared truth, enabling collaborative decision

making around metrics, performance measurements,

events, and challenges.

5. Act on facts, which provide the validation people

need to make informed and effective decisions that

drive high performance business results.

6. Create a holistic approach to performance manage-

ment that extends across the enterprise and includes

both financial and non-financial drivers.

7. Link decision makers across the enterprise with a

network of shared information so everyone across

the enterprise can act in a shared context.

8. Create a culture around decision-making where

everyone has insight into a shared world of

performance information.

Cognos Metrics Manager enables companies to adopt

and practice these principles at the enterprise level, or in

specific departments within the organization. It is built to

articulate the complex interplay of people and processes

and to leverage this complexity into increased value and

to tightly link strategy to execution—whether across

the company or within a particular department—and

performance. In doing so, it is a cornerstone of effective

decision-making and higher performance.



12

A complete performance management environment,

Cognos Metrics Manager fulfills the promise of next-

generation scorecarding and is an enabler of corporate

performance management. Below is a brief discussion

of its key features and functionalities.

BUILT FOR BUSINESS

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

Cognos Metrics Manager displays summary views based

on the Balanced Scorecard and other methodologies,

and users can easily explore detailed metrics results

and history.

Analyze issues to the required depth

The rich Cognos scorecarding environment, through in-

tegration with Cognos reporting and analysis capabili-

ties, lets you analyze performance issues to understand

what drives a metric’s change in order to make better

decisions. Choose between a reportlet 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

Users can 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 gener-

ate PDF files that you can print and share in hard copy.

Consolidated views of cross-functional metrics

Cognos Metrics Manager uniquely combines disparate

metrics from different functional areas and data sources

to create a single repository of the metrics that the

organization can agree on to create scorecards and

thereby monitor their performance against targets and

objectives.

Embedded business analysis 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.

Impact analysis diagram

COGNOS METRICS MANAGER KEY FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY



13

Dynamic diagrams

Dynamic diagrams give users the capability to view

metrics in context overlaid on images, such as JPEG and

GIF files (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 graphical

images.

BUILT FOR IT

Metrics definition from disparate data sources

Cognos Metrics Manager can import and provide data

to populate and support your scorecard from any

source, including Cognos BI sources, Excel spread-

sheets, flat files, user-entered values and third-party

databases. A Data Loader Utility is provided to

automate the loading of data from flat files.

Easy to deploy

Zero-footprint architecture means users and adminis-

trators do not require software installed on their

desktop, making global intranet or extranet use and de-

ployment 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.

Scalability

Cognos Metrics Manager was built to handle the

data volumes and user requirements of Fortune 1000

companies.

Flexible metrics building

Cognos Metrics Manager lets you control the specific

metrics or KPIs you wish to track, how they are com-

bined, criteria for good and poor performance for each

indicator, and set links to supporting reports of any

format, which can provide additional analysis and

context for users.

Central metrics store

Cognos Metrics Manager historical data, as well as

scorecard, diagrams, and metric definitions are main-

tained in an industry-standard relational database.

Cognos product interoperability

Cognos Metrics Manager is interoperable with the

Cognos enterprise-scale BI framework and full suite of

BI tools, and is integrated with Cognos Web Services.

View metrics by owner



14

Application access and security

Integration with the Cognos BI access and security

foundation means users are easily assigned to classes.

These classes determine the scorecards and metrics

they can access through a simple and single sign-on di-

alogue box.

Metrics relationship auto-diagrams

Automatically generated HTML displays of the

relationship between metrics reduces implementation

effort.

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative-certified

Certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative,

Cognos Metrics Manager includes Strategy Maps

and other Kaplan & Norton Balanced Scorecard best

practices that can be easily and quickly modeled though

menu-based administrator functions.

Utilization monitoring and analysis

Cognos Metrics Manager can track its own performance.

It allows administrators to analyze how the application is

being utilized throughout the organization.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• 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,

Oracle),

• J2EE Application Servers,

• Browser IE V5.5 and higher (for users or administra-

tors), or Netscape 6.2 (for users).



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ABOUT COGNOS

Cognos is the world leader in business intelligence and

enterprise planning software. Our solutions for corpo-

rate performance management let organizations drive

performance with planning and budgeting, monitor it

with scorecarding, and understand it with enterprise

business intelligence reporting and analysis. Cognos is

the only vendor to support all of these key management

activities in a complete, integrated solution.

Founded in 1969, Cognos today serves more than

22,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enter-

prise business intelligence solutions and services are also

available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners

and resellers.

ABOUT COGNOS



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