The number one priority with incentive compensation management (ICM) is paying commissions accurately and in a timely manner. A strong reporting strategy should be tied to this process, which can make a significant difference in terms of building employee trust and in increasing productivity. A typical example of how reporting can impact ICM processes is the Compensation and Detail Statement. When designed well, this type of report...

IBM has signed an agreement with Mapbox to offer geospatial mapping in Cognos Analytics (CA).  Cognos Analytics will ship MapBox with CA and offer it at no additional cost to customers (unlike some other Analytics partners of Mapbox). MapBox is a unique provider of geospatial capabilities, deployed first and foremost in the Cloud, which means easy global access and a continual stream of daily updates to maps from leading data sources....

Recent studies show that 74% of financial managers are using spreadsheets as their primary vehicle to generate reports.  This means creating lengthy reports or presentations manually, which can yield financial documentation that is prone to human error, contains outdated information and has little or no version control.  This in turn brings key problems associated with a manual reporting process, such as information and data on...

Rarely, is the truth in plain sight.  When faced with disparate systems, applications, or sources, gathering the data in a single place is only half the battle. The second half of the equation is putting in place a stringent set of data standards that would enable users to slice and dice data in whatever context they need it.  Creating a database that provides a holistic view of all relevant domains and focusing on information content...

The landscape is changing. In recent years, we’ve seen explosive growth in the need to analyze massive volumes of information from disparate sources both structured and unstructured.  Say you recently helped stage an environment from 100 data sources and 10 source systems for an estimated audience serving 10,000 users. Ten weeks later, due to the sudden success of your integration efforts many new demands are in your backlog, your...

Financial forecasting and Business Intelligence (BI) analytic tools provide business users with a single data source. All “actual” information is derived from the company’s proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, automatically updated to a single DataMart at user-defined intervals for use by all reporting tools. All forecasts created in a budgeting and forecasting solution are “written back” to the DataMart, to then be...