OTTAWA, June 29, 2000—Nestled between the Coast Mountain range and the Fraser River, the City of Coquitlam, British Columbia is a community rich in natural beauty and bustling with economic potential. That’s why the city managers decided to take an unprecedented and sophisticated approach to developing economic and community programming for the 110,000-person community.

The City chose Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world’s largest and most successful business intelligence company, to ensure it was able to make the right decisions to enhance the community’s vast potential. Put simply, Cognos business intelligence solutions allow organizations to make better decisions quickly by performing sophisticated analysis and reporting on organizations’ business information. According to David Nelson, application services supervisor, the City can now project the economic development benefits arising from different kinds of development activities.

Before Cognos, City government really had no way of working with all of its critical data at one time. Their old legacy systems were slow and inflexible, falling short of the diverse reporting and analysis demanded by the city managers.

Coquitlam wanted to provide users with reporting tools that would empower them to view and analyze city data when, how and where they wanted. "We were steadily moving away from the legacy custom COBOL applications toward Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, but quickly realized that ERP packages offered limited reporting internally and across applications," said Nelson.

To solve the problem, the City is building a data warehouse which incorporates data catalogues from the City’s data holdings including - maintenance management, financials, human resources and payroll, taxation and property management systems. The Cognos business intelligence solutions are able to unite the information, and allow users unprecedented analysis and reporting options.

Today, the City has deployed Cognos to run inventory reports, financial statements, taxation reports, budget variance reporting, work orders and maintenance management reports. Importantly, reports are generated quickly, easily and without intervention from IT, according to Nelson.

The City’s Planning and Development department can now analyze the different types of development taking place in the city based on data collected from city land development permits. They are able to break down the data by development type (e.g. apartment, single-family residential, commercial, etc.) and to drill down to the details of each summary. Graphical presentations also allow visual trends to become apparent.

Along with this data the City also collects economic data associated with this development. Delving into an analysis of new construction jobs created, tax revenue increases, new economic input as a result of population increases, new associated development, city planners have a clearer picture of the economic impact projects are having on the City.

"The data gathered from these reports helps managers anticipate future needs of the city and its residents," said Nelson. "We are using Cognos in an growing variety of ways. It is changing the way and speed which decisions are made. The advantages are significant and we have only just scratched the surface of potential in other areas."