Cognos, an IBM company and leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today unveiled IBM Cognos 8 v4 which extends IBM’s Information on Demand strategy to help customers improve their ability to engage the business user through a more dynamic and interactive experience, inform their decision making with greater context and relevance and align their strategy and operations through complete visibility to targets, plans, forecasts and metrics across finance and operations.

IBM Cognos 8 v4 lets organisations easily and securely extend access to trusted information to fully engage a diverse group of employees, customers and partners across financial and operational divisions and processes. Richer BI and performance management user capabilities such as enterprise planning, dashboards, analytics and reporting combine with an enhanced enterprise-class platform, flexible business modeling, and consumer-oriented interfaces to help business users gain access and interact with the right information needed for decision making to optimise business performance.

Casual business users, business managers, and executives in all sizes of organisations are grappling with information overload and the rapid pace of change in today’s globally connected economy. These types of business users represent 80% of workers in average organisations, according to Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research at the Data Warehousing Institute. They need quick access to relevant information, whether they are in the office or on the road, to make informed decisions that improve financial and operational visibility and drive overall performance.

New self-serve flash-based dashboard, mobile and search capabilities in IBM Cognos 8 v4 help business users quickly drive decisions through flexible, consumer-oriented interfaces that let them access and interact with relevant performance information using familiar applications or devices. These include BlackBerry®, Symbian or Windows Mobile devices, enterprise search engines or desktop productivity applications.

The debut of IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint introduces new cross-functional business modeling capabilities to help business users and IT collaborate. Business users define a shared representation of how their business information should be structured and viewed to drive decisions in a workflow environment without disruption to the downstream systems which are governed by IT. These capabilities let financial analysts, line and brand managers, or data stewards maintain, govern and share hierarchies and business views according to their own organisational preferences while the IT department retains control over how approved changes are published and used.

Customers can further align business operations, advanced analytics and strategic plans across the organisation by using IBM Cognos Now! and IBM Cognos TM1 as trusted data sources for IBM Cognos 8 BI and Planning. Key metrics from the continuous business monitoring of operational metrics can easily be added to a personalised business dashboard along with key parts of business reports that are pertinent to a particular line of business. Newly updated enterprise planning capabilities blend both planning and analysis features to help increase the productivity and accuracy of planners within the planning process. Planners can also build persistent views of the organisation to provide increased context for forecast data entry.

These enhanced user capabilities are supported by new solutions and updated professional services, education, and support offerings to further accelerate customer success. Today, Cognos has also introduced IBM Cognos 8 Financial Performance Analytics which is the latest addition to the Cognos’ family of Analytic Applications. It is designed to provide organisations with fast, actionable insights into financial performance using fully-configurable reports for general ledger, receivables and payables analysis.