BURLINGTON, MA, July 24, 2002—Leading global organizations are embracing Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI), to drive forward their corporate performance scorecarding initiatives. With over 300,000 scorecarding and dashboarding licenses in deployment, executives and managers worldwide are using Cognos to better monitor and manage enterprise performance.

Cognos Series 7 offers broad-based support for quality methodologies like Six Sigma, the rigorous performance measurement system designed to drive continuous process improvements toward a goal of zero defects in products and services. With robust and easy to design scorecards and dashboards for Six Sigma and other quality methodologies, Cognos Series 7 allows organizations to easily create performance scorecards so individuals and groups can see precisely how they are tracking against management goals.

"Few suppliers in the business intelligence market can closely marry performance scorecarding and dashboarding technologies with enterprise business intelligence reporting and analysis. Cognos, by presenting relevant business information in a graphical scorecard, allows decision-makers to transform raw business data into visual displays that get straight to the heart of a business issue," says Robert Moran, vice president and managing director, Data Knowledge & Analytics, Aberdeen Group.

The Cognos solution's 'open methodology' approach ensures customers can implement any of a number of quality/performance initiatives including Balanced Scorecard, ISO 9000, EFQM and Total Quality Management (TQM).

A Cognos partner, Minitab Inc. provides statistical software and services used around the world by thousands of distinguished companies such as GE, 3M, Ford Motor Company, the leading Six Sigma consulting firms, and in more than 4,000 colleges and universities.

"Cognos Series 7 provides organizations with out-of-the-box visualization support for Six Sigma, providing Global 2000 companies with the capabilities they need to manage corporate performance," said Jean-Pierre Mulley, product manager, Minitab. "The complex statistical requirements of Six Sigma are displayed in a highly visual way with Cognos Series 7, enabling immediate insight and corrective business action."

Winner of the 2002 Intelligent Enterprise Readers' Choice Awards, Cognos Visualizer is integral to the Cognos Series 7 business intelligence framework, allowing users to display multiple, diverse metrics across a single Web-based dashboard. Cognos dashboarding provides users with several visual reports at once in a highly intuitive graphical manner that allows users to understand the interrelationships between key metrics to effectively manage the performance of their business.

Organizations from healthcare, financial services, the public sector and manufacturing are using Cognos dashboarding and scorecarding solutions to link individual execution with overall business strategy across the enterprise, fulfilling a critical element of effective Corporate Performance Management (CPM).

A consulting partner to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, Fuentez Systems Concepts, based in Charleston, SC, delivers large-scale business intelligence solutions to organizations like the U.S. Coast Guard. Today there are 35,000 users of Cognos via nationwide Intranet at the U.S. Coast Guard. Users access mission-critical information through performance scorecards, analyses, reports, and multi-metric dashboardings such as maps across a highly scalable Web-based Cognos system. At peak periods, the Web-based Cognos Intranet can service more than 1,000 concurrent users with split-second response times.

"We have fully upgraded the Coast Guard's Readiness Management System with Cognos Series 7. Cognos Series 7 delivered on the promise of rapid deployability, scalability and high performance. Our teams today are benefiting from the integrated dashboarding and scorecarding solutions in the Cognos Series 7 offering, allowing our users to get 'at a glance' information on the key drivers of our organization. Importantly, Cognos Series 7 offers us a solution that will keep on scaling across a Web environment as our user community grows," said Ed Waizenegger, systems engineering and technical services team at the U.S. Coast Guard and a business intelligence consultant with Fuentez Systems Concepts.

"Cognos is at the forefront of the scorecarding revolution, with a scalable, mission-critical solution that is enterprise-proven and continuing to gain marketplace momentum. The Global 2000 has embraced Cognos Series 7 to monitor, analyze and report on key business drivers," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, marketing, Cognos. "With Cognos multi-metric dashboards and performance scorecards, decision-makers achieve immediate insight, then drill into the relevant reports and analysis all from an integrated, single system. The result is better decision making."