Cognos a world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today furthered its ongoing relationship with IBM by appointing Steve Lukens, IBM’s global leader of Financial Management (FM) Consulting Services, to the advisory board of the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management.
Mr. Lukens is responsible for leading IBM consultants around the world who provide strategy, systems and process assistance to CFO’s and finance organizations across all industries. He joins an esteemed group of advisors that guide Cognos and its customers in advancing state-of-the-art Performance Management practices.
IBM and Cognos have recently strengthened their industry alliance to jointly drive marketplace innovation and help more enterprise customers succeed with their Business Intelligence and performance management initiatives. (See: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2006/0307.html) Mr. Lukens will share his insights on key trends in performance management during an executive panel with Cognos CEO Rob Ashe today at Cognos Forum, the company’s annual customer conference.
Mr. Lukens has spent 24 years at Price Waterhouse, PwC Consulting and IBM providing operational improvement assistance, process redesign and change management services to a variety of multi-national, multi-billion dollar companies. His expertise and main focus is on improving the finance function within these companies.
“CFOs are facing a transformation imperative as they work to strike a balance between effectiveness, control and efficiency while managing complexity, supporting profitable growth and balancing risk,” said Mr. Lukens. “Our implementation expertise and Cognos’ performance management solutions help CFOs face this challenge and win. I’m pleased to be working with the Cognos Innovation Center representing IBM in an advisor role to help more companies accelerate innovation and responsiveness as they progress business performance management across their enterprise.”
In his role as advisor, Mr. Lukens will participate in one-on-one vision sessions, executive roundtables, and workshops designed to help companies understand the opportunity for performance improvement and develop a vision and roadmap using industry best-practices for sustainable process improvement.
“I’m pleased to see the two companies continue to drive innovation,” said Francois Boiteux, director of organization and information systems, Clarins. “The addition of IBMs’ financial management expertise to the Cognos Innovation Center Advisory Board will help companies accelerate their process improvement and performance management transformations by providing additional insights and practical best-practice solutions for implementation success.”
The combined Cognos and IBM Financial Management Consulting Services offerings help companies realize the promise of performance management by aligning top-to-bottom business objectives and metrics, increasing visibility into business activities and IT resources, providing access to and analysis of real-time and historical information from multiple sources, modeling and monitoring of business processes to improve effectiveness, supplying role-based views and collaboration to initiate actions based on insights, and providing IT management systems that enable controlled environments.
“We are excited to add IBMs’ deep, proven expertise in financial and performance management to the Cognos Innovation Center,” said Renee Lorton, SVP and General Manager, Cognos Performance Management Applications. “The addition of Steve Lukens will be a great complement to our industry-leading Innovation Center advisory board and will help Cognos continue to offer thought leadership and best practices to Cognos customers as they progress on their paths to automate and optimize performance management across the enterprise.”
Cognos Innovation Center advisors also include Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Research Director, Jeremy Hope; The Hackett Group’s Chief Research Officer, Richard T. Roth; President of Palladium Group and Co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard, Dr. David P. Norton; and Sonax Founder and President, David Axson.
