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Mike Ferguson’s PM Soapbox

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PM explodes way beyond BI

In reply to Mike Ferguson’s PM Soapbox

Hi,

Welcome to my new Blog on Performance Management and BI. I hope you find it interesting and make it a fun topic.  Being from the UK I was going to call it PM Questions after the House of Commons Prime Minister’s questions every week in the UK Parliament. However I thought a PM Soapbox would be a better title.  Anyway hope you enjoy it.

My first topic is PM itself and what’s happening in the market. Over the last two years the explosion in growth in performance management has been phenominal.  This market has traditionally been “owned” by the BI vendors and the recent round of BI platform announcements by Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects and SAS is focussing greater attention on PM.  However the issue for me is that PM is being portrayed as if it is just a BI thing. Yet business operations is way up there as a huge area for growth in performance management and BI vendors have yet to realise the importance and huge growth opportunity of operational performance management whereby we can 

• Monitor business processes and events as they execute
• Automatically analyse the significance of these events
• Automatically take action by alerting people or invoking other applications and processes
• Have operational applications request on–demand BI and on-demand recommendations to guide people and systems in keeping operations optimised
• Get the whole enterprise executing off the same business strategy whereby ever user has their own alerts, recommendations, guided analytics and guided actions to help them contribute to business performance. 

It looks to me that it is operations business employees who are set to really make the real PM impact and yet we see no real integration of operational performance management into BI vendor offerings as yet.  What is more interesting is that if you look over in “operational land” the business integration infrastructure vendors are beginning to rumble on PM to the point where it is already clear that PM has started to break ranks and go way beyond BI.  The scorecards and dashboards are going to have to come together with business process management, BAM, rules and on-demand BI to get the enterprise moving.  Already the big four integration vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) are starting to produce dashboards from monitoring live operations and pushing these into portals for personalised role based operational PM. Operational PM is already happening “outside” of the BI circle and not using PM tools from BI vendors.  So it is inevitable here that PM offerings from BI vendors and PM offerings from business integration vendors have to come together to create an end-to-end PM platform spanning BI and operational business processes. We are going to see scorecards allowing you to view a PROCESS model as well as KPIs so that we can manage at strategic and operational levels off the same management tools.   Who is going to own the PM market? My bet is that at least one of the sizable BI vendors in the market is a real candidate for acquisition by a software giant so that we can take PM enterprise wide.   

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