Greetings from the IBM Cognos Business Analytics Forum. IBM just released the latest version of Cognos: Cognos 10. The general theme around this new product is: Intelligence Unleashed.
The theme is quite powerful and it made me think about how most of us conduct our work. I have met many clients that are still struggling to gain control over all their spreadsheets. They struggle to reconcile data between different systems. As a result, many professionals spend way more time on mundane and non-value added tasks than on inspirational and high-value tasks. As a matter of fact, a survey that we conducted a few years ago revealed that finance professionals spend over 70% of their time on administrative things. Many people that I talk to feel that they are not using their talents appropriately. A customer recently joked: “The CPA credentials that I have worked really hard for stand for Copy & Paste”. That’s a tribute to the enormous amount of manual labor conducted by her and her team.
Isn’t it time to take things seriously? Is this the way we want to work? Shouldn’t we start spending a lot more time on the exciting and analytical tasks? Technology like Cognos 10 allows us to automate processes and to seriously increase our analytical capabilities. Just imagine if we could spend time on all the cool and exciting things that we learned about in business school. The tools are there to help. Let’s start unleashing our very own talent!
