Corporate Financials

It starts with the desire to give our CEO access to corporate financials at any time. While the interface was successful, the need for manual data massaging made it obvious we needed an overhaul of the internal finance reporting data. With this change there is an ability to direct AI to find more insights.

IBM’s most important finance data delivered to the glass for the CEO

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a strategic initiative within IBM to transform the fragmented management process to create an end-to-end workflow to deliver a Management Cockpit.  That is a lot of words to say: make IBM’s internal data more unified so that it can be compared within itself for better analysis. 

While this project has been around for several years, in 2018 it hit an inflection point.  This is when a Cognos based dashboard was presented to CEO Ginni Rometty.

She was not happy with the results. At the beginning of July, I was added as the designer to a small team focusing on making this something she could not only use, but would want to use. 

One problem: although the EPM project had 2 years to get to this point, we only had 8 weeks to far surpass them.  One more twist, where the original dashboard was presented on a laptop, we needed to target an iPhone, the one device Ginni always had with her.

BEFORE

  • Navigation is not clear

  • Overwhelming amount of data

  • Information is not well organized

  • Easy for the user to get lost

AFTER

  • Reduced Data to Most Needed

  • Mobile Deployment

  • Logically organized

With only 8 weeks to transform this dashboard, I set out to understand all of the data and strip it down to just what is needed most and what information our leaders use to understand the data.

It quickly became clear that the orienting information would be IBM Business Units, Geographies and Industries. I created a simplified interface that provided the Finance data and allowed it to be filtered by BU, GEO and Industry but easily remove any filters to facilitate exploration of the data.

This new design was a big success. Not only did we deliver the working mobile app on time, but it was easy enough to use, that Ginni did not want to have it explained, she just wanted to click around and explore the data.

The end result replaced over an inch of paper with an always up-to-date tool Ginni can always have with her

To prepare for the big reveal to our CEO, I worked closely with a visual designer and the product owner to produce physical materials and a video to introduce application.

The video was used to introduce “Mia” to the SVP Forum in August of 2018.

I also created a physical iPhone-sized booklet that demonstrated the main functions of the app and worked as a reminder to our leaders that they can go to Mia whenever they have financial questions about how the IBM business is doing.

All this was delivered in an iPhone box, giving the leaders the experience of opening a new iPhone and getting Mia.

Receiving this box gave the CFO, Jim Kavanaugh, a huge satisfied grin, winning over the C-Suite.