The Corporate Performance Management Practitioner

October 5, 2006

CPM Articles from the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA)

Joel Vander Weele wrote this in the early afternoon:

The IMA has put together a list of articles on Performance Management. I am a bit surprised that this great reference list is available to the general public.

Four Feckless, Counterproductive Business Approaches to IT

Joel Vander Weele wrote this in the early afternoon:

Four Feckless, Counterproductive Business Approaches to IT

Read the article, and then come back and read my comments..

I found this to be a very pragmatic discussion of the real world communication gaps between “the business” and “IT”. This article makes a whole lot of sense in light of general IT, but these 4 gaps really apply to CPM and BI. This makes perfect sense, because these areas require very tight alignment between IT and business.

Lets consider each of these common mistakes in context of Corporate Performance Management and Business Intelligence.

No Long Term Plan: Very few organizations have any kind of long term strategy for CPM and BI. The tools are seen as “report writers” and are applied at ad hoc basis to pain points. Have a problem getting information out of SAP? Throw Crystal at it. Have a problem with printing financial statements? Drop it out to a Spreadsheet (and violate every Sarbox rule at the same time). Use Cognos to analyze sales.

This short term thinking just creates more information silos, not less. It costs more to support and makes life more difficult for everyone. It lowers information quality.

Forcing Projects along..everything is needed ASAP: This feels familiar to the CPM Practioner. I can’t even count the number of times I have seen a report or data mart built as a priority item…and when it is presented to the user a few days later, they forgot they requested it or found an existing report that met their needs. On the other hand, I have seen IT respond ridiculously slow to even simple requests. Part of the problem is considering BI or CPM as a project, not a lifestyle. These systems are constantly changing, and any IT group supporting one needs to create mechanisms that allow them to respond to user needs quickly. A request for a new report or dashboard should be considered a frequent event…it should not be treated like a full fledged project.

Not knowing what they don’t know: In the article, the author points out that many business people believe they know more about IT then they actually do. I consider this to be a fair assessment, especially in smaller organizations. This can certainly apply to BI….how many end-users have written never ending queries by using point and click data modeling tools? This can also apply to IT types of course. I have heard the same IT manager comment that he wants a BI tool to prevent certain types of joins…but he also wants the complete ability to type in his own freeform SQL. Doesn’t he realize that a BI tool just sends the query to the database? Of course, there is some IT types feel a paternalistic need to “protect our users from themselves.” IT goes out of their way to limit what BI endusers can do. In the best case, this forces IT into a situation where they have to respond to the smallest user requests….in the worst case, it causes the business to ignore IT and go off on their own. I once was involved in a project in a large organization’s human resources department. I needed to get some data from Peoplesoft; it seemed easy enough, since Crystal Reports was on everyones desktop…but the outsourced peoplesoft administration team refused to allow any users to access more than 1 table at a time. What did the users do? They all downloaded every peoplesoft table they needed to their desktop..and built joins within Microsoft Access. Every user had a unsecured, badly working peoplesoft data mart on their machines…complete with the most confidential employee information. Whenever I read about organization’s losing laptops with confidential employee or customer information, I think back to this particular project. There is no way that this stuff should be on a laptop unless this kind of thing is happening.

Blaming IT for project failures

IT takes a great deal of blame, both deserved and undeserved. IT departments probably don’t do a good enough job communicating their value to the rest of the organization; this is especially true of organizations that do not view IT as a strategic weapon. On the other hand, IT groups can be difficult to work with. I see this particular “approach” as a symptom of other problems. If the first 3 issues are dealt with, than there should not be a need to allocate blame.

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