The Corporate Performance Management Practitioner

Here is a great resource on CPM..the personal website of Art Schneiderman. He has some great, very accessible content all over the site, but was particularly impressed by his archive of the earliest Balanced Scorecard initatives at Analog Devices. It is clear that this first BSC evolved from TQM initatives (there is that focus on business process again!). Remember that Kaplan and Norton did not originally focus on the execution of strategy…Kaplan was coming of a number of books and articles where he was questioning how traditional Management  Accounting was failing to meet the needs of Managers. His interests were in TQM, ABC, and so on.

 Make sure you review the Art of Process Management section. Great Articles.

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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.

Suggested Reading

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Top 10 Project Pitfalls You Can Avoid

Great Article from Baseline…how many of these issues affect CPM systems? How about all of them?

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This website, which apparently was created as part of a better government program which is now obsolete, is a great resource. It cuts through CPM hype and delivers about the most realistic portrait what the benefits and obstacles of a working CPM system. Pay Special attention to the Addendums and links. Tons of good stuff.

City of GP - Performance Measurement In Government - City of Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, Official Government Web Site

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Like most professionals involved in this industry (Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management, Financial Applications, Decision Support, etc.) I am constantly exposed to marketing messages from the various vendors in the space. All the vendors really have the same message: Our technology helps your organization perform better by improving the usefulness of the information you use to make decisions.
Is this true? Is it possible to actually measure a difference between those firms who use CPM enabling technologies and those who don’t?

The Aberdeen Group thinks it is.
 In a new report, Aberdeen sees some substantial differences between those firms that have adopted CPM and those who have not.

Probably the most compelling factoid is the following:

More than 70% of companies who adopted some sort of CPM program generated high-impact improvements in key performance metrics, and these results were consistent across industry segments and company size:

•  Average Improvement from CPM Initiative:
• 5.0 percentage points gain in return on assets (ROA) 
• 4.9 percentage points gain in Percent Gross Margin

Regardless of how much faith you put into industry analysts opinions, this is pretty compelling stuff.
 

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In the last few months, several customers and prospects have asked for assistance in building dedicated offices for managing their investments in BI, Scorecarding and Financial applications. While it is too early to declare this a full fledged trend, I suspect more organizations will be considering this topic over the next few years. Each of the companies I have talked to have a different take on what they are looking for, but each firm realizes that it simply does not makes sense to build Decision Support/CPM systems in a vacuum. I often say that “CPM is a journey, not a destination.” If you take this concept to its ultimate conclusion, then it makes sense to build the capability to deliver CPM projects as effectively as possible as part of this journey. The firms I am talking to have different thoughts on what the word “effectively” means in the previous sentence. I must admit that my thoughts on this matter are also evolving rather rapidly. I am confident that there is no silver bullet here; every organization is going to have to pick and choose the right answer for itself. (is there ever a silver bullet? No) The term Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) has been floating around for some time. I first encountered the concept at a major utility company about 6 years ago. Like many organizations, they owned multiple Business Intelligence tools deployed in departmental and functional silos. Their version of the BICC was called something like “BI Advisory Office.” It was a part of the Information Technology organization and was made up of senior technologists. They had three primary roles: 1. Encourage Standardization They developed a list of “approved vendors” and encouraged (but could not mandate) the use of these vendors for all new development. They advised project teams on vendor selection. 2. Project QA They monitored projects and made recommendations on technical issues. They also got involved in infrastructure issues. They did not do development themselves, but acted in a advisory capacity. 3. Vendor Relationships They were supposed to act as single point of contact for support issues, new license purchases, and so forth. In practice, they usually worked closely with the project teams on support. The purchasing group handled the software buys. The natural next step in the evolution of this BI Office would have been the enforcement of the approved vendor list and development best practices. They could have developed a knowledge sharing capability, perhaps using Knowledge Management software. To move from an BI advisory group to a BI Competency center, at least in my mind, involves a change from a group of advisors to a group of doers. A BICC involves the capacity to actual deliver a working BI application in the context of a broader BI platform. What other functions makes sense in the BICC context? What happens if you move from BI, which is still essentially a technology project, into the realm of CPM? How does the BICC Change?

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