Cognos 8v3 - Ask the Experts

After Mr. Ashe concluded his keynote presentation, he did a little Q&A with industry analyst John Hagerty of AMR research, a noted expert in performance management as well as compliance. John is a favorite of the performance guys and a great choice for this type of event for a variety of reasons - he knows a ton about the space, is very credible, and he speaks clear English and does not pull his punches. He also happens to be a former Cognos employee, which never hurts, but John did not expressly endorse the product, nor would you expect him to.

John did a Q&A with Rob Ashe and continued to reinforce some of the key themes and challenges in the market place: billions of dollars spent on aggregation and collection of information without enough measurable impact or direction on what to do with the information or how to drive business return. Also the challenge of not enough tools - or the right kind of tools for all types of users.

Hagerty and Ashe both commented that for many organizations, the journey to a performance managed and optimized organization is still early stage. Ashe also commented that journey is often custom to the needs of individual organizations. (Very good point)

To address this issue, Hagerty outlined a maturity model for organizations moving to a more strategic approach to BI and performance management. For AMR clients, you can find it here, but for the rest of you, the headlines of the 4 stages are:

1. Reactive - Performance management and/or BI used to address a specific issue. This services as the baseline in the department or organization

2. Anticipation - The viral impact as performance management projects starts to spread. Nothing breeds success like success

3. Collaboration - A more proactive approach as the organization starts to recognize the cause and effect relationship between their goals, the information and the expectations of performance.

4. Orchestration - A coordinated approach that moves everyone to the same sheet of music. Very much rooted in strategy

Both Ashe and Hagerty asserted that most organizations are early in the process, but on their way to a more strategic, higher value approach. Interesting, and likely due to time constraints, neither panelist was asked or volunteered examples of more mature or performance managed companies. While Southwest Energy was on the video transition to the panel and spoke live later(I will comment on this later), I thought this was a missed opportunity.

The closing remarks by both men netted out to don't boil the ocean with your performance strategy and look for return at every step. This is very much on point and a constant struggle for those in both business and IT looking to execute on their performance strategy.

Overall this was a good session and both presenters were on script and kept things moving. However, the audience and Cognos might have been better served to allow John Hagerty a little more time and his own stand alone presentation slot to get one level deeper on how to make performance management actionable and reference some more specific case studies in context of the AMR maturity model. This might have cut into the demo a little bit, but the credibility of AMR and a global view would have served the corporate interest at least as well. And teams were standing by to demo around the room.

Stay tuned for new product features and demo update.