02 April 2009

Forum Success Continues with BI Forum

Following on from the success of Fios' consolidation forum held earlier this year,our second forum, aimed at the Business Intelligence community was held on the 31^st of March.

Christa Smith, who is the Business Intelligence Consulting Manager at Fios, gave a presentation on how businesses could maximise the value of their Performance Management & Business Intelligence investments. The talk also elaborated on the importance of Business Intelligence in a Weak Economy, which is especially significant in the current financial climate.

Fios' Business Intelligence product manager, Thabo Sibeko, presented an overview of the latest release of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. The presentation included an exploration of new features and products such as:

• Flash-based and self-service IBM Cognos Go! Dashboard which makes it easy for users to create their own dashboards without relying on report authors or IT personnel.
• IBM Cognos Business Viewpoint which is an enterprise-wide dimension management solution. It allows for the central management of hierarchies, structures, and definitions in a centralized store for use across performance management applications.
• Enhanced features such as annotations, data lineage and more engaging charting elements and interfaces.

The feedback from the attendees was that the forum was beneficial as it gave them more insight into how they could derive better value from their Business Intelligence initiatives.