Cognos Commitment to Quality

From Rob Ashe, General Manager
IBM Business Intelligence & Performance Management

It is our commitment at Cognos, an IBM company, to provide you with the highest quality products and services. Since its inception, Cognos has been dedicated to putting the right people, processes, and best practices in place to ensure that you get superior value and quality from us. I take great pride that many of the people who helped establish that tradition of quality still work at Cognos and, together with their more recent colleagues, have put their methods to work in the planning, creation, and support of our current generation of products.

Cognos Best Practices
Cognos follows established software engineering practices in the conceptualization, design, planning, and construction of its software products. Our development life cycle ensures that functional and technical requirements are defined and documented, that projects are planned, scheduled, and controlled, and that software components are thoroughly tested both individually and as part of a larger, integrated system.

We routinely conduct formal usability testing in our state-of-the-art Usability Lab. We have a stringent beta testing program that ensures that our products are tested by participating customers in their environments prior to sale. In addition, we apply significant investment to testing within the labs of many of the leading hardware and software vendors including IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and many more.

Unparalleled Customer Service
Cognos has an automated system used to track problems reported by customers or internal users through the process cycle of diagnosis, solution design, implementation, and delivery. There are well-defined policies and procedures for the escalation and resolution of customer problems, maintenance releases, etc.

Our responsiveness to the needs of our customers has not gone unnoticed in the industry. Cognos has won the Software Support Professionals Association's coveted WebStar Service award three years in a row (2000 to 2002) for delivering superior online Web site services to customers through the Cognos Enterprise Services Portal. In their 2001 edition, the Association of Support Professionals named Cognos one of the "10 Best Web Support Sites in North America."

A History of Quality
Since 1979, Cognos has established a successful track record of building and supporting quality software products. During the 1980's and early 1990's, the Cognos PowerHouse product line became the most widely used 4GL tool in the departmental minicomputer market, in use by thousands of customers worldwide to build mission-critical applications.

Since that time, Cognos has grown to become the leading business intelligence (BI) vendor-with more clients, market share, and BI license revenue than our nearest competitors. This is an end-result of our commitment to quality.

The Road Ahead
Our improvements in quality are being increasingly driven by the use of our own business performance management tools and techniques—by using them to measure our results and to use what we learn to continuously improve on what we do and how we do it. In this, we are following the same advice we give our customers.

Rob Ashe
General Manager
IBM Business Intelligence & Performance Management