Cognos unveils new collaborative business modeling software
By John mathews
Cognos, an IBM company and a provider of business intelligence solutions, has unveiled a new collaborative business modeling software for business users to create, maintain, govern and share business perspectives and organize information for improved decision-making and performance management.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint is a new performance management offering that addresses the increasing globalization, industry consolidation and data governance challenges businesses face. These modern organizations need an intuitive, workflow-oriented business process that lets financial analysts, line and brand managers or data modelers structure their own view of key information and supports the multiple levels of authorization required to manage business performance across the organization. These capabilities are essential whether the organization is determining an effective way to standardize relationships between operating companies, or managing product and customer dimensions and their associated roll-up structures, said Cognos.
IBM has said its Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint provides the business user with dimension management capabilities that helps them maintain collections of business hierarchies and dimensions to yield new insights, easily reach all data, and align both systems and people to the latest view of the business across finance and operations.
IBM claims that its Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint is built on the IBM Cognos 8 enterprise-class platform. Its SOA architecture provides an open approach to data access so architects can leverage existing standards and business process management solutions. Changes to dimensions can be tracked back through IBM Cognos 8 Planning and IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence so business analysts and system administrators can validate proposed changes and make master dimensions available for reporting, analysis, enterprise planning and dashboards across the entire performance management system.
To address governance and data integrity, IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint centrally stores dimensions to enable a common view across the organization. It also replaces any manual efforts with reviewable, automated and auditable processes. This lets data stewards or business analysts ensure compliance with organizational and external governance standards. A documented audit trail provides one-click access to data lineage while security features ensure proper version control and management oversight on changes and approvals to maintain system integrity. The workflow also supports collaboration and approvals across multiple sets of users.