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Business Performance Management a BI Driver |
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Source: IT Business Edge | Priority:
Integrating the Enterprise |
Topic: Business Performance Management
Date Published:
9/15/2005
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With Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners, a vendor-neutral business performance management company.
Question: Are the lines between business performance management and plain old business intelligence blurring? Are the two categories blending?
Schiff: I don't see it quite as a blending. It's the application of business intelligence tools and data warehousing to solve a business problem. So BPM is really a factor that's driving the adoption of BI and a good use for it. It's putting BI and data warehousing to a specific use, as opposed to just doing them for their own sake or some minor, off-to-the-side project.
Question: One issue in business performance management is what people started out calling "real time" BPM. Now the phrase being used is "right time." But either way, when IT executives start thinking about getting information to the operational levels to influence operational decisions, what questions should they be asking about the technology they need?
Schiff: Coming back to the start of the question — is real-time really essential for most of the data you need to run your business? — the answer with very few exceptions is, not really. When you look at manufacturing data or retail point-of-sale information, you might want some immediacy. But the bulk of information is information you look at on a periodic basis, whether it's daily or weekly or monthly. The appropriate way to deal with that type of information — to make sure it's clean and consistent — is often in a staged manner. Some of the debates we find are: Should there be a BPM data mart? How should you fit in existing data warehouses? Should you go directly back to source systems? Those questions have to be answered first before you determine what's the right software solution.
Our belief is, in most cases, staging the data is the correct answer, even though there are obviously some redundancy and synchronization issues. Typically in BPM you're looking at a subset of your data — a very important subset, but a subset of all the transactional data you have. And staging that makes sure the data is going to be consistent, that everyone's looking at the same information, and that there's high performance — because you're taking a subset of the data and placing it in a central mart that the system will then access. It won't bog down the source systems by sending queries out to them constantly. Once you've sorted through all these different approaches, then you can begin to think about who has the product that's best suited.
Question: Do you have an edifying success or horror story for us?
Schiff: Mostly it would be success. There's a pseudo-horror story — and it is common. These systems are led either by finance or IT. When they're finance-led they typically start with budgeting and planning, because that's a foundational element for BPM. When IT is leading the charge, they often start with dashboards. The problem is, dashboards are a great way to look at your key measures in a highly visual, intuitive fashion. But in many companies those key measures haven't been thought out. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of them, so they're not very key, and the underlying data either isn't actually present or consistent or clean, so there are large data issues. In some cases there isn't even a good planning system underneath, so the data you're comparing the actuals to is from a haphazard collection of Excel spreadsheets. The problem we see — and our job is to prevent it — is thinking of BPM as just the dashboard. You really do need all the underlying components to get all the processes and data in sync before you start displaying it to everyone through this graphical interface.
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Survey: Enterprise BI Elusive
TAKEAWAY: According to a survey by Nigel Pendse, BI implementation has hardly changed since 2002. Pendse says enterprise BI continues to be elusive, which might be because vendors don't seem to know what users want.
Source: ITWeb |
Priority: Aligning IT & Business Goals |
Topic: Business Intelligence
Date Published: 5/28/2008 |
Date Reviewed: 5/29/2008
How One Company Implemented BI for Less Than $25k
TAKEAWAY: Associated Grocers Senior VP Steven A. Miller explains how the company was able to implement business intelligence for less than $25,000. Miller began the BI project after a vendor showed him that by using Microsoft tools, such as SQL 2005 and report and analysis services, he could create a tool that used Excel as a means for display.
Source: CIO.com |
Priority: Aligning IT & Business Goals |
Topic: Business Intelligence
Date Published: 4/27/2008 |
Date Reviewed: 4/29/2008
Users Bypass IT with New BI Tools
TAKEAWAY: According to research by Gartner, IT won't have much of a role in the emerging business-intelligence technology as the tools make it easier for users to build their own analytic applications. To address users' increasing independence, Gartner suggests that IT departments incorporate the new technologies into the standard BI architecture, communicate which performance measures should be used and create a governance strategy.
Source: Computerworld |
Priority: Aligning IT & Business Goals |
Topic: Business Intelligence
Date Published: 3/19/2008 |
Date Reviewed: 3/31/2008
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