Who: The conference is designed to attract senior marketing, planning and knowledge executives, business intelligence practitioners, and suppliers of tools and solutions. Attendees are expected from across Canada and the northwestern United States.

What: Keynote speakers, panel discussions, case studies, break-out sessions, workshops and more. The BI Conference objectives are to:

- Showcase business intelligence in action – Explore best practices, effective tools and techniques – Examine the current state of business intelligence in corporate Canada

When: Thursday, November 9, 2006, 7:30am – 5:00pm

Where: Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia

Visit http://www.mria-arim.ca/BICONFERENCE/default.asp for more details.

The half-day event will feature Cognos CPM experts who will demonstrate how organizations can improve visibility and control of enterprise performance with the Cognos CPM Solution.

‘When decision makers are looking to find answers on their company’s performance, they ask questions in three fundamental areas i.e. How are we doing?, Why?, and What should we be doing?. Most companies deploy many different tools and systems to provide their users the answers to these questions. The result of this fragmented approach is a slow, disconnected decision-making process with low end-user satisfaction and high costs of IT’, said Mohammed Khasim, Sales Manager at BSG.

‘With Cognos’ CPM solution you provide your users with the ability to answer all three of those questions from a single platform that includes world class scorecarding and dashboarding – to answer ‘How are we doing?’ Reporting and Analysis to answer ‘Why’ and Planning to answer ‘What should we be doing?’

Having all the critical capabilities to manage performance means that your users look at a single set of metrics across these processes. When they’re looking at a metric, it’s based on the same calculation, the same roll up, the same assumptions as the plans and the reports – they are the same numbers. They are completely inter-related so that decision makers can quickly and consistently find answers to the critical questions that drive performance.’, Khasim added.

The attendees will also get an opportunity to listen to local customer case studies and how Cognos has helped these organizations deliver significant improvements to their financial planning, analysis and reporting processes. It is expected that more than hundred senior business and technology executives from various vertical industries in the Middle East will attend the event. The Cognos Performance Management Seminar in Riyadh is part of a regional roadshow which has already visited Dubai early this year.