City of Atlanta Standardizes on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Burlington, MA (PRWeb) December 21, 2006 -- Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that the City of Atlanta has standardized on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) for Atlanta Stat, its city-wide performance management initiative in a multi-million dollar partnership.

Founded in 1837, Atlanta is the fastest growing city in the United States, known as a global transportation hub and established banking center, with world headquarters for 13 Fortune 500 companies. In order to accomplish Mayor Franklin's priorities of ensuring fiscal responsibility and maintaining efficient government, Atlanta needed a more effective way to evaluate departmental performance and manage its billion dollar annual operating budget.

Atlanta selected Cognos 8 BI to aggregate disparate data from multiple sources, such as PeopleSoft, to provide information access and visibility for more than 1,500 government officials across all city departments, from the Mayor to individual managers in its Atlanta Stat process. For example, Atlanta's Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs is now able to have self-service access to real-time information such as service level vendor agreements, and analyze the impact of performance at the field-crew-level on common functions across the city. Previously, this process would have required weeks of resource-intensive efforts.

"In the City of Atlanta, we needed a total performance management solution that would enable us to become a more efficient, cost-effective and accountable government organization," said Chuck Meadows, Chief, Budget & Fiscal Policy, City of Atlanta. "With Cognos 8 BI, we can more easily communicate and manage performance goals and service level agreements across our agencies citywide. By selecting Cognos as our performance management solution, we can eliminate the need for additional solutions while driving enhanced performance throughout the organization, ultimately resulting in better services for our citizens."

"The City of Atlanta is a representative example of the significant value local governments can derive from an enterprise performance management strategy," said Terence Atkinson, Director, Government and Education Solutions, Cognos. "Cognos is the only supplier in the market with the full product capabilities to deliver a total performance management solution for our customers. The combination of world-leading reporting and analysis capabilities and dynamic scorecarding will help put the City of Atlanta on the path to continuous performance improvement, which ultimately means improving service delivery across the city with the same resources."

Cognos partner Sky Solutions assisted with the pilot phase of this program and will continue to deliver its expertise, alongside Cognos consulting services, to help the City of Atlanta complete the full deployment.

Cognos is a leading provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions for state and local governments, helping them deliver timely, high-quality programs and services to their citizens. In addition to the City of Atlanta, leading customers include City of Albuquerque, District of Columbia - Office of Budgeting & Planning, New York City Police Department, and State of Texas Building and Procurement Commission. For more information about Cognos solutions for state and local governments, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/government/state-local.html.

About COGNOS:

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization's ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? - and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

###