IBM And Cognos Team Up On BTO Service

ARMONK, N.Y. & BURLINGTON, Mass. - Business intelligence and performance management solutions leader Cognos and IBM have extended their global strategic alliance to deliver a workforce performance management solution through IBM’s world-leading Human Resources Business Transformation Outsourcing (BTO) service.

IBM selected Cognos 8 Workforce Performance as a standard analytic and reporting solution to be delivered within its full-service Human Capital Management (HCM) outsourcing solutions portfolio. The addition of Cognos 8 Workforce Performance extends IBM services to its clients by teaming their HCM capabilities with valuable analytic insight into workforce trends and influencing factors within the talent management cycle. This includes visibility into key performance areas such as workforce strength, employee turnover, compensation and incentives, talent segmentation and performance ratings.

IBM selected Cognos’ next-generation analytic application because of the solution’s packaged workforce content, and its ability to quickly adapt to a wide range of customer and business requirements. The Cognos 8 Workforce Performance solution is a configurable analytic application designed to reflect a company’s human resources best practices, leveraging a rich library of pre-packaged reports and analytics on a wide range of key workforce metrics, all of which can be easily modified or extended with the evolving information needs of the business.

Through this alliance, IBM BTO customers will benefit from an efficient outsourced HR services model that can enable the organization to proactively identify and prioritize headcount needs, optimize and align workforce investments to corporate goals, improve employee job satisfaction, nurture career growth, and reduce turnover.

“IBM prides itself in delivering solutions and services that unlock business value, reduce risk through technical and process improvements, and recognize tangible program cost savings,” said Steve Kagan, general manager, IBM Human Resources BTO. “By leveraging Cognos as an embedded workforce performance reporting and analysis engine, IBM is setting a new HR outsourcing standard that delivers enhanced workforce performance visibility that can evolve as our customers develop the attributes of a truly on demand business.”

Underpinning the Cognos application’s flexibility is an open Adaptive Application Framework that increases business agility while also reducing costs and the over-reliance on scarce IT resources. Based on the open, modern services-oriented architecture found in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, Cognos 8 Workforce Performance enables organizations to easily extract and transform transactional workforce data into consistent, reliable and relevant management information, helping to reduce errors and cut reporting cycles. Cognos 8 Workforce Performance is controlled and automated through a single, model-driven configuration interface, which leverages underlying engines needed to transform the source data, populate the meta data repository and generate all reports and analysis that are fully customized to the organization’s specific needs.

“IBM and Cognos share a common vision for providing cost-effective solutions that enable organizations to more effectively deal with significant human resources issues such as the graying workforce, impending skills gap, and increased market competition for talent,” said Doug Barton, vice president of product marketing at Cognos. “Cognos is proud to have been selected by IBM as a workforce performance partner in helping deliver a stronger and more strategic HR function for IBM BTO customers worldwide.”