IBM Cognos Disclosure Management
Overview
Large multinational businesses are complex creatures, especially financially. These companies must generate financial reports on a quarterly and annual basis. Once you have the consolidated figures, our users will use CDM to figure out what story the numbers telling, generate supportive graphs and visualizations, and create the actual financial reports. Within CDM, our users are still working in their familiar environments such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The previous CDM offering was on-prem, making it expensive, slow, non-transparent and hard to move around. Our team was tasked with creating a new solution in the cloud with an intuitive interface and workflow that should transform our users' work.
Note: CDM has since been acquired by Certent, Inc.
*The work below is comprised of my contributions, as well as work done by my team.
Company
IBM
Role
Design Team Lead,
UX Contributor
Portfolio
IBM Analytics
Process + research
Before the design team joined, offering management was able to run 5 prior Design Thinking workshops on their own, since they had not had a dedicated design team ever. The workshop data helped us tremendously, however, they mentioned they just hosted them and weren't able to consolidate or take action on them. So a big part of our work was to synthesize folders of work, listen to playback videos, and formulate assumptions and ideas.
Iterations
After finding out what our users pain points and struggles were, we started ideating and generated three high level concepts to help drive our designs forward, and to help our extend offering management and development teams understand the process better.
The Hub
A unified experience for users to transcend and collaborate across various financial processes and reporting statuses
Workflow
A single place to view the overall progress of a report, as well as individual objects in their current states
Birds Eye
A way for teams across departments to get a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the entire process, as well as a deeper view of individual projects and tasks.
Final
Below is a walkthrough of the final concept, The Hub. We got positive feedback from users and saw it as most useful since two other teams sitting next to us in the studio were working on the other two financial products that could fit into this workflow. Through collaboration and many conversations around users and their needs, we finally found a scalable platform to house them. My team and I were pulled from the project, but we didn't want to leave the team empty handed. We created a user research plan, provided usability tests, and worked with the team to get the designs in front of users. I am unsure of where it landed before the product was acquired, but as always, it was a great learning a new domain.
