IBM Cognos Now! delivers an operational BI solution that continuously monitors time-sensitive key performance indicators (KPIs) and line-of-business operational metrics. Designed for rapid deployment and low total cost of ownership (TCO), the solution is delivered through a variety of platforms including a prepackaged hardware, software or virtual appliance.

Operational business intelligence lets decision-makers proactively track and respond to continuously updated operational metrics, with minimal IT intervention. IBM Cognos Now! offers self-service dashboards with embedded query, reporting and analysis, tightly integrated with IBM Cognos 8 BI, providing up-to-date, actionable intelligence for rapid, fact-based decision-making.

The industry's first Operational BI appliance

IBM Cognos Now! delivers highly visual, interactive, and self-service dashboards, data integration, analysis, and reports, all prepackaged in a hardware appliance.

• Continuous monitoring for business operations, operational KPIs and metrics:
  Empowers line-of-business users to proactively and rapidly respond to ever-changing business conditions with 64 bit in-memory streaming technology that ensures operational metrics are always up-to-date.
• Autonomy for line-of-business user:
  Minimize reliance on IT with self-service, interactive dashboards that line-of-business users can customize for their day-to-day jobs and specific operational KPIs and metrics.
• Cost-effective, low risk, and rapid deployment:
  Provide unlimited access to dashboards and data sources to all line-of-business users at a lower TCO, with no role-based pricing. Minimize IT effort and resources with a pre-configured hardware appliance from a single vendor that is easy to deploy, manage and maintain.
• Closed-loop business performance optimization:
  Identify and customize operational KPIs and metrics. Allow visibility into operations performance at transactional or KPI level, understand and perform root-cause analysis, and drive insight to corrective action.

Dynamic Architecture

The core product features of IBM Cognos Now! include:

• Streaming dataflow engine: Monitors business events and integrates those events with contextual data from data warehouses or operational data stores in real-time. Provides a complete, higher value view of critical operational metrics.
• Temporal processing: Enables the business user to associate time with events, to identify trends over time and understand events in the larger business context, and distinguish between momentary spikes and real trends.
• Operational dashboards: Provide real-time visibility into business operations, KPIs, and KRIs, personalized by individual users, allowing rapid response to changing market conditions. Alerts can be used to make time-sensitive decisions, or to initiate actions such as generating workflows.
• Rich analytics: Provides detailed metrics and contextual data that help the business user process and act on the alerts.
• Seamless integration: Integrates easily with the IBM Cognos 8 BI platform and with operational applications and legacy systems that already exist in your environment via standard interfaces.
• A single, integrated continuous monitoring solution for operational BI: Deploy an operational BI solution in days. IBM Cognos Now! plugs into your existing network and includes data integration, analysis, end-user dashboards, and collaboration tools.

There are three types of appliances available: hardware, software, and VM. Each appliance type is delivered in three appliance sizes - 3500, 5500 and 7500 versions. Each appliance type includes:

• Operational dashboards: Continuous visibility into all of your critical business information and an easy-to-use interface for customizing metrics, setting alerts, and drilling down to detailed data.
• Application workbench: Allows system administrators to quickly and easily set up data integration, analytic models, and end-user dashboards to present current information, historical data, or aggregated views.
• Streaming and analytical server: Houses a patent-pending streaming data store for continuous data integration, as well as engines for multidimensional analysis, dynamic modeling, business rules execution and exception and alert reporting.

SLA monitoring

Effectively monitoring and managing service level agreements (SLAs) on an hourly and daily basis is a burden faced by the majority of customer service organizations. Without real-time visibility into your support center performance, your SLA management could be severely compromised, leaving you with plummeting customer satisfaction, lost renewals and possible financial penalties.

To effectively monitor SLAs, you need proactive, automated and real-time visibility into your SLA performance metrics and leading indicators, to ensure problems are addressed before they become contractual violations.

By consolidating and correlating essential metrics for support agent performance, service availability, parts quality, incident details and more, a customer support director or manager can view the necessary information to gain insights and rapidly take the appropriate corrective actions to increase and ensure the performance level of customer support.

Continuously monitor KPIs

IBM® Cognos® Now! offers a real-time monitoring solution that enables you to continuously monitor your customers' key SLA metrics, drive proactive corrective actions to deliver enhanced operational efficiencies and deliver increased customer satisfaction scores.

With IBM Cognos Now!, your support team is empowered to continuously improve customer service delivery in the following ways:

Discover and identify intra-hourly or daily patterns to uncover quality, customer and agent performance issues.

Create alerts and watch points to monitor key customer, call, incident, part and failure metrics, issues for dispatch, call escalation and support center resource allocation.

Generate alerts and escalations to take immediate corrective action for addressing call abandonments, sub-par call resolution, defect incidents and staffing issues.

Develop reports for hourly, daily, weekly trend analysis of agent, service center and dispatch performance metrics.