CAM Case Study

Overview
The IBM® Cognos® solution had a proven track-record in scaling to large numbers of users and the ability to handle volume in disparate data sources.
Business need:
Provide the organization’s sales force with secure, centralized, efficient Web-based access to critical sales information.
Solution:
The IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux® solution on System z® enables a streamlined approach for the IBM sales force of 30,000+ to access critical business information from a single Web portal, when and where they need it.
Results:
In the first three months that the IBM Cognos reporting solution was in place, users ran more than 200,000 reports. By five months, that was up to 350,000 reports – a growth rate that validates just how quickly the new solution was integrated into the organization and proves the tremendous business value of IBM Cognos 8 BI.
Benefits:
A simplified user experience with enhanced capability, enabling greater productivity; greater value to the business and to the IT group; a foundation platform for the standardization of BI across IBM.
Case Study
In IBM’s view, today’s global economy has created a worldwide business landscape and a mandate for business change. Integrated global markets provide new opportunities and new sources of skills. This vastly expanded landscape has also created a wealth of new challenges as companies vie for customer dollars in a world that demands round-the-clock availability in order to remain competitive. The Internet has enabled communication and collaboration around the world, and brought with it a new computing model based on continuous global connectivity. Within this new context, companies can distribute work and technology anywhere in the world. At the same time, they also need to access information that can be hosted anywhere and may be needed at any time.
To help its clients position themselves better to take these opportunities, IBM is partnering with them to develop new business designs and technical architecture that gives them the flexibility they need to compete in this new landscape. The organization is also adjusting its footprint toward emerging economies, tapping their double-digit growth, providing the technology infrastructure they need and taking advantage of the talent pools they provide. It all revolves around one common goal: serve the company’s clients better.
As IBM focused on delivering critical business intelligence (BI) to its sales staff, the company encountered the very same issues its customers faced. IBM was often asked, “What do you use for effective BI?” Until the Cognos acquisition, IBM had a collection of tools with relatively low cohesion across the organization. Now, with the IBM Cognos platform, IBM is able to deliver incredible business value and critical information to a large, dynamic sales force at low cost and high ROI.

Challenges Faced
IBM’s largest financial system in one location – IBM Field Management Systems (FMS) – is also one of IBM’s largest systems in terms of usage and data volume, with 120 terabytes of direct access storage data (DASD). But this is only one component within a much broader environment, as IBM FMS also provides critical reporting capability to sales and sales support teams throughout the company. IBM needed not only to deliver information to users, but also to avoid costly downtime that could severely affect the sales organization’s effectiveness.

There was a growing need within IBM FMS for a secure, centralized and efficient system to provide critical sales information to everyone within the sales organization. The entire IBM sales force needed centralized, Web-based access to huge volumes of customer information from multiple sources. The sales force also needed a simplified means of analyzing information, identifying problems and responding quickly to critical business trends. If that wasn’t enough, the solution also had to be cost-effective and easy to deploy to a large user population.

To reduce system’s footprint, IBM consolidated FMS installations from five locations around world onto one IBM System z in Boulder, Colorado. The move resulted in significant improvements in total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company. Even then, there was still more to do.

As a global innovation leader, IBM wanted the company’s sales force to have seamless access to large amounts of data whenever and wherever they needed it. This required collecting information from multiple data sources in the most effective way to provide clearly understandable, easily read reports. The sales team needed to be able to monitor and track progress against their sales quota and forecast future sales transactions quickly and easily.

The previous solution took significant amounts of time to generate reports. Worse, the reports themselves were fraught with unnecessary detail, largely due to the ponderous nature of the tools used. As a result, the reports were hard to review and understand. The large volumes of data also created performance issues that affected user satisfaction and productivity. A scalable system was clearly needed to provide easy navigation for over 30,000 users worldwide and provide reports with just the information needed.

Strategy Followed
Once IBM acquired Cognos, the company recognized that it could use a powerful business intelligence (BI) tool to further empower the sales force. The company chose IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z in a large part because it unites the proven reporting and analysis capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI with the power and reliability of IBM System z.

IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z had a proven track record of scaling to a large number of users, while supporting volumes of data from a variety of sources, all without affecting system performance. The ability to use System z for their BI infrastructure provided the necessary assurances that IBM Cognos 8 BI could be deployed and operational within the required 4-month window.

Executives realized that the IBM Cognos system would allow them to consolidate multiple data sources into a single view for the business, and provided top-down sponsorship in order to ensure a seamless, on-time implementation. The IBM Cognos 8 BI system had already been established as a scalability leader, and could easily expand to meet the number of users involved – up to 40,000 in this project – with the performance that IBM demanded. The IBM System z running IBM Cognos 8 BI also met another FMS criterion, 99.999 % availability. Management could see that centralized system management would simplify deployment, maintenance and migration, and reduce costs thanks to its reduced application footprint.

IBM began implementing IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z in November 2008 and completed the project within four months – compared to a full year for most typical distributed implementations. This included installation, creation of the reporting infrastructure, deployment and training. During that time, users ran everything from detailed weekly business reports and monthly achievement reports to territory analysis reports. Reports on cost, revenue, profit and signing information used in IBM’s outsourcing contracts are now being run on a daily basis. This was unheard of prior to the new solution.

Benefits Realized
As a result of choosing IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, FMS is now able to deliver:
• Low cost, rapidly deployable, agile BI solutions
• A simplified user experience with enhanced capability
• Better performance and response time
• Improved scalability
• Increased user productivity
• Greater value to the business and to the IT group
• A foundation platform for the standardization of BI throughout IBM.

With IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, the sales team now efficiently reports and analyzes transactional systems information located directly on System z through a modern, open, thin-client BI solution, enabling users to identify and respond to critical business trends quickly. By achieving highly targeted information delivery and analysis capabilities, IBM has given front-line managers more detailed, accelerated insight into strategic business information.
In the first three months that the IBM Cognos reporting solution was in place, users ran more than 200,000 reports. By five months, that was up to 350,000 reports – a growth rate that validates just how quickly the new solution was integrated into the organization and proves the tremendous business value of IBM Cognos 8 BI.

"The IBM Cognos system is a very powerful tool that gives quick and easy business information access to a large number of users,” says John Palermo, Director Global Incentives Business Transformation at IBM FMS. “We will eventually have approximately 40,000 people using it, as we continue down the path of adoption and implementation.”

User adoption has been quick and enthusiastic due to the single Web portal infrastructure and elegant interface provided by IBM Cognos 8 BI. Reports with critical business information are easily accessed on demand. Users can take advantage of the drill-down capability in IBM Cognos 8 BI to provide the same information with fewer reports and less data volume than previously required. Users’ reporting experiences are simplified and improved thanks to a restructured infrastructure that speeds reporting performance and response times.

This improved performance is made possible by hosting the BI processes in the same environment as the data. The configuration and deployment on System z has been simplified, while reliability, availability and other service level-related performance criteria have been improved. Costly outages are avoided, which in turn improves user confidence and acceptance. IBM’s Palermo understands all too well the devastating impact of an unplanned outage.

“I couldn’t afford to allow that to happen, which is why we made the choices we have made,” Palermo says. “The IBM System z availability guarantee ensures that costly downtime is eliminated.”

In essence, the IBM Cognos solution for FMS provides the ability to connect and consolidate disparate pieces of data into consistent, actionable business information on the modern mainframe – which ultimately delivers increased value to the business. The solution scales well, is secure, provides significant cost savings and has increased the productivity of its users within IBM FMS. IBM expects its customers to see the same benefits should they opt for this solution.

About IBM Cognos BI and Performance Management
IBM Cognos business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions deliver world-leading enterprise planning, consolidation and BI software, support and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. IBM Cognos solutions bring together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers an open, adaptive and complete performance solution. Over 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries around the world choose IBM Cognos solutions.

Question:
1. Analyse the given case in terms of overall growth of the company.
2. Give suggestions so as to improve the organizational effectiveness.