CPO Blog

I got involved in a couple of threads lately discussing the merits of modeling in light of new technology. I did fill up some space on those threads, but will be merciful and put my semi-rant here.
As a James Martin Alumni, I got to see the benefits of modeling at its best. When used properly in a disciplined approach (such as information engineering, rapid application development, agile development, etc.) modeling leads to two things:
- Faster overall development time
- Increase quality / flexibility
OK, for the folks that about to say the extra work of modeling, how can that make it faster. Quite simply, modeling facilitates higher levels of understanding and communication within a development team and when that team communicates outside of its circle. The data model is still the best mode of communicating business data relationships.
As far as increasing quality, like any other engineering discipline, thinking before doing is a universal tenet. This does not mean modeling in of itself makes for higher quality, but it can be said that modeling gives a proven mechanism for controlling quality and can allow for more flexible expansion of an application.

How can we learn from history?
Back in the days of mainframes, organizations smartened up and stopped hacking code and embraced modeling and methodologies. This was starting to really take hold around 1990, but then all hell broke loose on the technology end and client server was upon us. For some reason, the leaders of the client server tool market (powerbuilder, visual basic, delphi, etc.) said modeling was only for mainframes and the technology made modeling redundant and/or obsolete (does this sound similar to some of the hype in DW now). Fast forward to 1999 and all that powerbuilder stuff was being rebuilt (with funding from Y2K).
The lesson, technology can help, but cannot replace modeling.

It is true that we are going through tremendous changes in the DW/BI/MDM space which will undoubtedly have some impact on the way we use data models (logical and physical). But to assume that technology will make modeling obsolete is destine to repeat the sins of the past.

After keynoting TDWI in San Diego, I had a chance to sit down with Paul Kautza of TDWI and talk about CPO and the upcoming TDWI event. You can see the video here.

Thanks to all who attended TDWI in San Diego this week. Even with all my travel woes (22 hours from Maine to California), it was a pleasure keynoting Monday morning.
Also, thanks to all who stopped by for a book signing at the booth. Please email me with your comments/feedback.

I did have a call to action. As I said in my keynote, I am starting some academic research around performance management and IT strategic alignment and have some room for a few more companies to participate in this. It is an academic study (not selling you anything!) and your company can be blinded. You will also get full results of the research. Please contact me directly if you want to know more or participate.

Safe travels.

Are you going to TDWI San Diego next week? Set the alarm for Monday morning and catch my keynote of Chief Performance Officer, A Role Whose Time Has Come. Also, just added a book signing on the expo floor on Tuesday afternoon, at the Oracle booth.
Hope to see you there.

Tom Davenport talks of the Rise of Chief Performance Officer in HBR Blog. Having Tom validate the CPO concept is a true seal of approval that the CPO is here.

In the latest issue of Journal of Management Excellence, I published an article about the use of analysis chains in understanding and achieving value in an organization. Analysis chains are a method for combining cause-and-effect relationships and technology feasibility. Read the article here.

After the withdrawl of Nancy Killefer from the federal CPO position, President Obama has nominated Jefferey Zients for the position.
Glad to see the position did not go away with Ms. Killefer’s withdrawl.
Confused about what a CPO does? See my interview on Foxnews.

I caught up with an old colleague last week and got talking about a project. His user group was using the newly deployed BI and reporting system in an interesting way. They had deployed mostly in an ad-hoc with some built in analytics.

The way he described it was a “Hunch Support System”. Basically the managers were coming up with hunches on how what they needed to do next and then supporting this hunch with an adhoc query to corroborate with the results. In one way it is quite an underuse of the capabilities in the system considering they had implemented full blown BI and Applications, but at least they are using the system. For this group of users, the HSS has become a bridge for them to start using the system.

Hopefully they will move beyond HSS and start using the complete system. I have a hunch they will !

I was recently talking with a relative who works the finance department in the waste management industry, particularly in the portable toilets you see at construction sites, events, etc. We got on the subject of the economy and he had some interesting observations.
Because so much of his business is tied into new construction, he said his business trending became a great leading indicator for the overall economy. He could see from his business trending downward in the individual new construction.
Interesting enough, with the stimulus, we will probably see this leading indicator increase because of the amount of roadwork type of projects.
The economy is full of these anecdotal leading indicators. It would be great to have BI capture and model these at a macro level.

With the stepping down a few weeks ago of Nancy Killefer, the topic of Chief Performance Officer has seemed to vanished from the front page of the newspapers. CPO though, has picked up more steam than ever in the Private sector. Accountability in a commercial organization for all performance seems to have become quite a popular topic.
A great example is Wyndham’s recent press release where Daniel del Olmo as Chief Performance Officer of Wyndham hotels. See press release here. Daniel is taking performance front and center in his organization to navigate through the changing times. It is an affirmation at the CEO level that managing performance is more important than ever and visibility is needed at the C-level of an organization.

I was recently talking with a colleague in the public sector. He was describing their data warehouse. It has been in production for few years.
The hardware is stable..
The software is stable ..
The network is stable ..
The data model is stable..
The data loads run nightly and are stable…

But… Nobody uses the data.

We referred to this as the roach motel of data warehousing. “Data checks in but it never checks out”.

Seems the group that designed the warehouse did an outstanding job of designing the Holy Grail of data models. It had everything a user would ever need. It was pulling from various sources and homogenizing the data. But the group forgot one thing. A data warehouse needs business intelligence and analytics to make it truly useful. The only thing the users did was create an extract and then bring the data into Excel for some fancy reporting.

Although this is an extreme situation, it is still somewhat common. It only further points out the need for integration of the various disciplines that make up EPM including BI, Performance Management, MDM, ETL, Data Quality, and Operational Reporting.

Here is the link for my interview today on FoxNews Television about CPO. See it replayed on Foxbusiness.com/video

I did an interview with Federal News Radio on Chief Performance Officer. The topics were along the lines how can the traditional commercial role of the CPO be applied to Government. Hear the interview here.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=276

What I thought was a normal Wednesday morning waking up on the road to spend a second day with a customer, was anything but. Turning on the TV news I am greeted with the headline that President-elect Obama is going to name a “Chief Performance Officer”. Blinking a few times, I realized that I was not hearing things.
Since publishing my book “Chief Performance Officer: Measuring What Matters, Managing What Can Be Measured”, I have been on a crusade to bring performance management the level of attention it needs in every organization. And now here is it, staring me in the face, front and center of the economic crisis.
Besides shock, I have to say I felt a sense of accomplishment. When I published my book in 2003, the term Chief Performance Officer, was new to the general business world. Now less than 5 years later, it could not be more mainstream than what I saw today in the news.
Throughout the day, I received calls from everyone from business peers to academic peers to the press. Many of the questions they had for me were the same nature:

“Did you have something to do with this?”
“How is a CPO going to work in an organization like the federal government?”
“Who will explain what a CPO is to the regular person on the street?”
“Can it really work?”

I wish I could say that I directly had something to do with President-elect Obama choosing a CPO, but I would say my impact is more indirect. As the evangelist of Chief Performance Officer, my goal was to get as many organizations to pay attention to performance at the Chief level. If the CEO (or President in this case) places the level of importance on performance to create a CPO, then the resources (systems, people, technology) will follow. I have worked with many organizations that have CPO’s, but may not call them CPO’s. So, the move to call out the title and create absolute accountability is bold. If only some of the private sector organizations would be so bold!
As I state in my book, though, a CPO without actions is not a CPO. There are great tools out there to find the performance issues in government (waste, spend leakage, human capital metrics, etc.) and our new CPO will need to use all these technological tools to MEASURE WHAT MATTERS. It is the second part of the equation, MANAGE WHAT CAN BE MEASURED, that will be the bigger challenge. That challenge involved competing organizations within the government, turf protection, lack of ability to act and massive changes in fiscal practices. Sure, technology will help with also, but much of it is going to be management from above, governance and accountability. Again, going to private sector successes, it is not insurmountable, but requires explicit control and direct cooperation.

It’s going to be long journey to measure and manage the performance, but the tools are there to make it happen as well as the need.

Applications
The shift has been happening over the past couple of years from custom BI to application based BI. (see my DM Review article here ). The marketplace is mature enough to start to look at BI as an application similar to how ERP made that shift 10 years ago. So, instead of hearing about a custom data mart, the terminology is changing for functions such as “procure to pay”, “hire to retire”, etc.
An application based approach is much more understandable by business owners and should be more easily funded in the economic environment of 2009. I want to be clear that we are talking about “application based” not “application only” approach. Most organizations will still extend the out-of-the-box applications.
Bottom Line
BI will see a more focused approach to the bottom line of an organization. Areas such as spend management, hr optimization and financial planning will be some of the hottest areas of 2009. This does not preclude traditional top-line approaches for BI, but the bottom line focused projects will get to the front of the line for the funding.

This combination of will make 2009 the year of Bottom Line BI Applications.

My prediction is that a bunch of people will make a bunch of predictions for 2009.
Maybe I’ll do mine during the Holiday weeks coming up.

In the new economic times the need for a BI CoE has gotten new traction. Organizations are looking to do more with less in both development and maintenance. The CoE allows organizations to have the flexibility to deploy the resources to the area with the projects (aka funding). As getting projects funded has become more difficult, the smart organizations are standing up their CoE concurrently with a BI project that has funding. This multi-workstream allows organizations to do what they need to stand up the CoE without it being a stand alone project subject to cancellation.
The CoE as a tack-on to a large project lets everyone win.

For years I have been on a soapbox about the need for data governance. There have been some great adopters on this that have been a pleasure to work with, but it just never seemed to get the mainstream acceptance it deserved.
This past year has really shown the mainstreaming of data governance, and many of us have MDM to thank for it. Seems that MDM scares enough people about the lack of governance and what can happen, that they are taking it seriously. A week does not go by when I am not actively engaged in conversations and/or consulting data governance discussions.
Sometimes mainstreaming is good!

Remember the Seinfeld where George does the opposite? At TDWI, I was talking with a few folks about the state of BI in their company, and it reminds me of the opposite episode.
When some organizations are bunkering down on technology spend, these folks were doing just the opposite for their BI projects. Their management had recognized that BI can be an integral tool in staying ahead of the competition. One of the attendees said that cutting out BI was like cutting back on medical supplies during an epidemic because they cost too much.
This got me thinking about the trends of the last year and how BI has become the ‘have to have’ for business leaders, while many other technologies have become ‘nice to have’.

I got somewhat turned off on blogging earlier this year.  It seemed like it was just a bunch of noise and not much substance.  Now with the emergence and acceptance of Twitter, much of the noise (albeit some pretty good noise) is going on over there, and I feel that I can actively start my blogging again with content.

And what better time than what I believe will be a very good run for BI and PM.

Enterprise performance management (performance management for short) and master data management (MDM) are two of the most talked-about topics in business intelligence (BI) today. Although the industry treats them as two distinct disciplines with their own methodologies, tools and implementations, in reality, they are two dimensions of an enterprise information management strategy. Without the key performance indicators (KPIs) of performance management, MDM becomes an exercise in data integration, and without MDM, performance management cannot achieve the promised enterprise-level impact. This convergence will become one of the driving forces of our industry for the next couple of years. The convergence will be both logical, in how to apply various methods and techniques, and technical, in how to make the various technologies work together.

Read the full article here.

After a few days at TDWI, I have to ask myself, what recession?  The conference which normally gets between 500 and 900 attendees had over 1000 people.  This breaks the previous record for Vegas 06 when yours truly keynoted.

There was no doom and gloom among the general attendees on the economic or career outlook.  Whether this is optimism or reality, the overall theme was that the BI market is on the rise and the outlook for new projects and careers is sunny.

I was lucky enough to kick off the Tuesday Executive Summit with about 200 senior IT and Business folks and in talking with them afterward, I got the same impression that companies continue to invest in BI/EPM and MDM as they are seen as strategic value not just technology projects.  Many of their focus areas were on converging lines of business into one dashboard and building the MDM architecture to support it.

The expo floor was lively as ever with many of the same vendors and your usual string of upstarts.  Seem like the appliance upstarts on the expo floor of the last couple of years have been replaced by the columnar database upstarts. TDWI is usually a good gauge of vendor content as the vendors can not compete in the ‘my booth is bigger than your booth’ that you find at other more pay-for-play conferences.

On Monday night, I taught an abbreviated version of my EPM/MDM Bootcamp Class.  We had  pretty strong attendance, taking into account the competition with the blackjack tables and slots in Vegas.

I guess my overall impression is that BI is alive and kicking if this conference is any indication.

In December, TDWI published an Experts Perspective on picking the right metrics. Wayne Eckerson, Craig Schiff, Jim Hill and I each gave our perspectives.

You can check out the article at tdwi.org

If you are going to Vegas for TDWI, I will be presenting in both the TDWI General Conference with a Night School version of my CPM & MDM Class, and kicking off day 2 of the Executive Summit with a presentation about Behavior-Impacting Metrics.

Get the full conference details at www.tdwi.org.

At TDWI, find out what some of the trends for 07 and 08. Ted Cuzzillo brings out some good points about the just finished year and what to expect (with some quotes from yours truly).

Check it out at tdwi.org

Tim Feetham has put a great trip report out for the TDWI Orlando Conference where he talks about a number of classes including the CPM & MDM Class I taught.

Check out Tim’s report here.

In my final 2007 Column for DM Review, IT Scorecards and the five tempations of poor scorecards are outlined.

See how much you have given in to temptation at DM Review.

With Cognos getting acquired by IBM, it marks the end of the independent BI Vendor.

Less than 10 years ago, the marketplace was still looking for a dominant player, now there is not an independent market.  With this battle over, the next battle front will be the growth of the applications to sit on top of the BI Platforms.

Interestingly enough, Cognos’ less than successful attempt at Performance Apps was a little ahead of its time, but now the major players including Oracle are far advanced in the BI Apps.

Even with the death of the independent BI marketplace, this is still the most exciting time to be in the space.

Whether an IT, R&D, Marketing, Manufacturing or Sales department, we all have projects.  Granted some are more structured than others. Some use project plans.  Some use metrics.  Some are pure adhoc.   In any case, these projects generate project data, which translate to project metrics, which is the raw meat to feed analytics.  In the October DM Review, I outline Project Analytics and what they mean to any organization.

Read the Article at DM Review.

Hollywood likes the combined names like BeNifer, BradJolina.  So try this on for size SAPBO?

Seriously, the accelerated consolidation in our industry makes this an exciting time for all who have lived through BI ups and downs.  This now leaves Cognos at the top of the pure-play heap (for now), but also at the top of the acquistion list.  With BI losing its identity as a pure play space, and instead being part of bigger application and portfolio platforms, it can only be better for customers seeking true innovation in BI.  The big players with the deep pockets can bring BI where it could never have gone as a pure play. 

The Wall Street Journal had two articles on the business impact of BI.  The content is nothing profound for those of us in the industry, but the placement of these two articles in WSJ only emphasizes the key role of BI in overlapping business and technology.

The first article talks overall about business intelligence and sites some product references. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119023024488632729.html

The second article is all about HP NeoView in the role of creating the centralized warehouse.  The article paints data marts as the root of all evil, which I have a hard time swallowing.  The federated approach (Hackney)  to warehousing was probably too complex for this article, but federation is still one of the most successful enterprise strategies for warehouses. BTW: My commentary is that it is a little to much of an infomercial for HP’s products.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119023027984432736.html

I have been avoiding the acquisition rumors and only commenting when the deal happens.  But with the nearly acknowledged rumor of BO retaining Goldman to look for a suitor, I feel obligated to provide a link for you to decide.

Read this analysis and draw your own conclusions.

Acquistions continue even when nobody really knows much of the companies.  Longview, a lesser known CPM player was purchased by Exact Software.  I know, who? who?  Longview has been around for a while in the midmarket CPM competing with the likes of Applix and OutlookSoft (Now Cognos and SAP).  Exact Software, even less known that Longview, is a Dutch software company.

Probably has little impact on the market, but goes to show that while the big companies such as SAP and Oracle make purchases, the middle players like BO and Cognos continue to acquire, and it happens at this level even. 

Read the press release here.  Exact Software.

Using hospitals as an example, the tight integration of process mapping and data management is obvious.  As you move through a process, there are data waypoints where data is collected for immediate or future consumption.  Read the article in DM Review, where I outline the concept of data waypoints and hospital systems.

BO continued its purchase into the data quality space with Fuzzy Informatik.  Besides a name that brings a chuckle, Fuzzy Informatik is an attempt to fill in a data quality hole.  Read more at http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070905_006559.

Cognos announced the acquisition of Applix today.  Applix, whose technology has held a niche in finance, had mostly fallen off the map of the major BI or CPM players.  Part of the first generation of proprietary OLAP tools, TM/1, with its spreadsheet interface was a favorite of Excel power users.

As Cognos has moved futher away from proprietary cube technology, it remains to be seen how the core Applix technologies will come into play in the combined company.

In the August Business Solutions column in DM Review, I discuss the unique data challenges of being a middle man or distributor.  Caught in the middle ground from both a process and data perspective, this is fertile ground for the DM professional to make a difference.

Read the article here: DM Review August 2007

I guess it is becoming a recurring theme in this blog, but so many of the ‘new’ ideas we have in our industry are not new ideas, but new implementations.  The latest would be the Mashup trend.

In the Wall Street Journal today, there was an article about the Mashups sewing data together.  Mashups, for the uninitiated, are a development method for combining web-based applications into one mashed-up application.  Thus, information from one internal CRM site and an external site can be combined in one we application.  It is kind of a cliff note version of a portal.

Rewind 17 years to 1990.  The IBM mainframe is starting it’s slow death (slower actually than Jimmy Durante in ‘Its a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World), client server (ala Powerbuilder) is taking  hold in corporate IT. But there is a legacy of 3270 & 5250 (green screen text based monitors), applications running the real corporate systems.  Along comes ‘Screen Scraping’ technology.

Similar to mashups, screen scraping would integrate somewhere between the application and UI layer in traditional architecture.  The tool would read a screen through a terminal emulator on Windows and assign the fields to new maps.  More interesting, was the ability to combine multiple applications in one Scraped Screen.  For example, you could scrape the G/L systems and the Order Entry systems and create a single application view.

Well, screen scraping faded away with client server and the advent of web applications, but it probably would have died on it’s own for architectural reasons.  Putting the workload of what is really data integration at the UI layer limited scalability and was flawed.

Mashups, although more mature, are the screen scraping of modern time.  The more complex the mashups become the more you are pushing what really belongs in the data layer into a UI layer.  This is not to say that mashups do not have a place, they do.  But, as with most other fads, architecture and architectural compliance will eventually point to the right solution.

In another great article by Steve Swoyer at TDWI. org , he addresses the dashboard dilemma and some of the challenges facing the dashboard movement.

Dashboards have done a great job in pushing the UI and usability to the next level.  But, if history has proven anything in IT, push too hard and it becomes hype (can anyone say Computer Aided Software Engineering?).  Dashboards are still part of the solution and actually are making a great convergence point from a user perspective, but the total BI experience needs to be consistent and usable.

Read Steve’s article here.

I missed this article last week while attending a conference.  These IBM / Cognos rumors have been around for quite a while and do not seem to go away.  I am not a big follower of rumors, but do like the statement of

“Although the sector is consolidating, the importance of BI software remains strong. BI software now tops the “shopping list” of IT managers, surpassing security as the top software priority over the last two years. —Cheryl Meyer ”

Here is the full article

In the continued approach of the big getting bigger, IBM has acquired Data Mirror. Around for many years Data Mirror had grown a beyond-niche following.  Compared with Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion and SAP’s acquisition of OutlookSoft, IBM continues to take more of a plumbing and hardcore data movement acquisitions.

For those of us with IDMS in our background, it must be quite cool to have Computerworld list John as one of the 40 people you should know in IT, but do not.  Also in the list is Codd, Perot and Ritchie (of Bell Labs fame).

Read the article here.

I just loved this article by Steve on tdwi.org on the BI marketplace landscape.  This has to be one of the most exciting times to be our BI industry.

Read the article here 

Still more research supporting MDM as a critical building block of BI (and CPM).  On DM Review there is an article outlining Ventana research report.

For a view of combining the two, see the BI Review Article.

Earlier this month Microsoft purchased Stratature, a lesser known player in the MDM space.  I worked with Stratature a few years ago, when they were very much targeting the Cognos MDM problem in a decentralized cube environment.  With Oracle and IBM already in with their MDM offering it will be interesting to see how what happens to the pure play MDM companies such as Siperian.  A few years ago, the ETL market was declared dead with all the products being swooped up by big players, but Informatica is still the pure-play, so history does not provide the answer on this one.

In my June column, I talk about public sector can benefit from data management and some of the key challenges.  Taken directly from experience in a large urban school system, the article points out key places where DM can help.

Read the article at DM Review

The BI customer challenges faced today are not much different from the first wave of consolidations a few years ago.  I have cowritten an article for BI Review with Nadeem Mumtaz with the tips for surviving a vendor consolidation.

View the article at BI Review.

Article from DM Review, outlines the results of a DataMonitor report for IT Trends for ”

“According to the report ‘2007 Trends to Watch: Pharmaceutical Technology,’ translational medicine will drive adoption of robust data analytic solutions among other business intelligence (BI) technologies.”   CRM and Product Lifecycle Management round out the top three.

 Read the DM Review article here.

A full length DVD of the CPO Seminar is now available.  You can request a complementary copy or download here.

View the Trailer.

This month get set for a one two punch in DM Review and BI Review.  Out in print already, DM Review has my latest column for Business Solutions.  In the June BI Review, long time colleague Nadeem Mumtaz and I collaborated on an article on Surviving a Vendor Takeover.

Look for links when they hit the online versions of bireview.com and dmreview.com

The acquisitions continue as the big get bigger. Here is the latest from Business Objects. These acquisitions like the first wave (Cognos- Adaytum, Business Objects - SRC, Hyperion - Brio) continue to push the definition of what BI can be. In the first wave BI expanded to be include Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting to become true CPM. Then there was the push into data quality, particularly the Business Objects - FirstLogic. Now the push into unstructured.

But the first wave never really ended.  Cartesis ending up part of Business Objects and OutlookSoft going to SAP are two more ripples from the first wave.

This combined with the mega-mergers (Oracle-Hyperion), HP’s (re)entry and service push, Teradata spinoff and Microsoft’s continued integration of BI into MOSS makes this one of the most interesting and rapidly changing times in BI since the days when Redbrick and Informix were still products.

If you are interested in how the mid-market can use BI without having to invest the big bucks, please read my column in DM Review this month.  With the approach that the BI vendors and ERP/CRM vendors are taking toward the mid-market, the financial options are much greater than before.  There is also increased competition for the mid-market among the software vendors, so deals are there to be made for the smart buyer.

A colleague of mine is teaching Sunday 3/13 at TDWI in Boston.  If you are going to be there try to make Dave Fritz’s  High Quality Requirements Class.  Dave and I work together and you will not be disappointed with this class.

The HP NeoView makes sense, wider approaches to the appliance paradigm is a natural growth area, and with Knightbridge to back it up HP is clearly raising their BI footprint.  The Terradata approach has always generated interest, but would often been seen as non-approachable because of size or complexity.  With HP kind of moving into this space, it could make for an interesting outgrowth of the ever-consolidating pure-play BI market.
Tibco buys Spotfire. Not sure what to think here, but you can read about it

Business Objects to buy Cartesis. The consolidation in BI Vendors continues and I will keep my silence on where I think it is going, for now.  Look for my thoughts in an upcoming BI Review article (my first co-authored article, also).

I just completed my webinar for PMI Metrics Special Interest Group as part of their Congress 2007 month-long event and have received  fair amount of feedback.

If you did not attend, I did an overview of the CPO Book and the major themes including analysis chains and based on the feedback, I think I need to do this more often.  Many of my webinars and sessions have become more focused, particularly on my latest soapbox of CPM-MDM coming together, but the need for executive level metrics, which is the them of my book, still needs to be talked about.

Some of the feedback was very focused on how to ’sell’ metrics internally or get buy in at the right level.  Learning from history, the best way is repetition in multiple channels.   So, if you are reading this and need help selling the concept of CPO and/or Metrics based decision making internally, reach out to me directly and let me know how to help.  Or if you have promoted well internally, let me know what worked.

Here is the online link to the Physician Spend article. Even if you do not deal in any way with the life sciences, there are serious lessons to be learned from anyone who has a customer. For life sciences the physician is a key customer and using data management for the better understanding (and in this case compliance also) is key to success. Although not as simple as replace physician with customer in this article, the lessons can be universal to CRM.

DM Review April Issue Link

In the April issue of  DM Review, I discussed the concept of Going Beyond Compliance.  Basically, there are many projects, in this case I use Physician Spend for Pharma, that are compliance driven.  Two things I learned from the SOX stampede of a few years ago:

1. It is a heck of a lot easier to get a project in front of executive management for funding when it is compliance driven.
2. If you only fix the compliance problem, the solution will need to be revisited for other business reasons shortly after.

Thus, when you are doing a compliance driven project, try to satisfy some other business challenges or constituencies.  The gentle balancing act is adding the effort to go beyond compliance without breaking the budget bank!

Hey you have chocolate in my peanut butter.  You have peanut butter on my chocolate.  Those of you who were around the US in the 1970’s surely remember this commercial.   The commercial ended with something like ‘two great tastes  that go well together’.

In the March BI Review article, you can see the Missing Link between CPM & MDM.  More than distant cousins in the BI space, they are truly the chocolate and peanut butter of BI.

Oracle to buy Hyperion. Everyone in BI is chiming in on this from the start of the next round of consolidation to the end of pure-play BI to this is an isolated incident. Instead of a knee jerk reaction of throwing in my two cents to this, my silence is golden, but not perpetual.  Look for some thoughts in an upcoming BI Review article.

In a recent quote at TDWI (see article) I talked about how MDM can be the key driver for the data quality improvements.

Remembering my associative properties from math,  it is not too far a reach to show that if CPM can drive the need for MDM and MDM can drive the need for DQ, then CPM drives the need for DQ.  My thoughts are that whether the chicken or egg comes first, you must apply what business will understand as the driver.  If it is compliance driven, let the DQ or MDM drive. If it is performance driven, let the CPM drive.

In the end a true CPM solution will have to have some flavor of both MDM and DQ.

Interested in how business solutions can be solved with solid data management methodologies and technologies?  Please check out my column in DM Review in February.  The first column addresses the data challenges of a consumer goods  company and integrating syndicated data.

Not a CPG person?  The principles are still applicable to anyone that needs to integrate outside data.

Look for upcoming articles in other areas such as hospitality, life sciences, communications and financial services.

For those of us old enough to have worked in the mainframe days of MVS, much of the buzz of SOA seems awfully familiar.

See in the olden days, there was a mainframe which contained all the data and programs. It provide “services”, such as data storage services, memory services, printing services, display services, communication services, backup services ….

MVS was the grandfather of all SOA.  The divorcing from the mainframe and movement to client server and eventually internet architectures caused all the built in services that came with the mainframe to go away.  Strike the sheppard, scatter the flock, so to say.

In the world of client server SOA or replication of the MVS model was nearly impossible.  Thus when we moved to toward a more centralized internet (thin client) model over the past few years, the yearning for the past (even for those who it was not part of their past) crept in.  Thus the birth of SOA.

Do not get me wrong, I am not saying today’s SOA is as archaic as MVS (remember, there is a IBM 360 in the Smithsonian), but let’s learn from some of the good points of the grandfather of SOA.

• Services were predictable
• Services were tracked and charged
• Services were scalable (if you had the money!)
• Services were application driven
• Services were standard from company to company (MVS at your company was the same as MVS at mine)

Some pretty good things for today’s SOA to take as principals, right?

After recently meeting with a client, they shared with me their view of an executive dashboard.  Looking very much like a partial balanced scorecard, it got me thinking about the terminology mismatch we are seeing in the industry.  Whether it is a dashboard or a scorecard seems to be dependent on a couple of variables.

• Has the organization embraced a Balanced Scorecard?
• Does the organization use any built in Dashboards in their ERP, CRM or other applications?
• What BI platform do they subscribe to?

For a consultant coming in to a different situation for each client, I have found it best to check the terminology at the door.  If an organization is calling a dashboard a scorecard and a scorecard a dashboard, who cares as long as it is used properly by the business.

This need to nomenclature tolerance is a missing skill in so many IT folks.  We get hung up on the terminology in order to put the solution in box to solve, that we miss the business solution.

My advice, check the buzzwords at the door and concentrate on the business problem.

The industry likes to break various disciplines apart.  Many times this is along the lines of what software vendors are offering what wares.

In an upcoming article in BI Review, I discuss the high affinity between CPM and MDM.  Basically, we want the metrics people to talk to the master data people, since they are both needed to deliver the answers to business questions with high affinity and confidence of quality.

What is a New Year’s Resolution?  Well, you usually make some far reaching goal and commit to make it happen in the next year.  And as we all know, you have gone against your resolution by the first week in January.

My thought are that CPM is much like a New Year’s resolution gone GOOD.

The Commitment

In CPM you are committing to improving your corporate performance through some kind of measurement.  This is akin to “I will lose 20 pounds this year.”

Monitoring 

In CPM you actively measure against that expected performance using tools such as scorecards, dashboards and BI.  This is akin to stepping on the scale everyday to measure your weight.

Adjust

In CPM, you adjust your plan as the reality of business sets in.  This is best done through scenario-based planning and integrating actuals with plans and latest best estimates (LBE).  This is akin to seeing you are not losing enough weight and will cut down on your calories.

The Real Similarities

The sad part is that the way that New Year’s Resolutions are similar to CPM in today’s business world is that they are both promises not kept.  Companies go through planning and budgeting in Q3/Q4 and as soon as the new year hits, those budgets are out of date. Like most companies, the budgets are never updated and the resolution is broken.

I am in my twentieth year of my career, and when I was having lunch with a calleague today, we got on a discussion of user interfaces.  We both came to the conclusion in 20 years we have basically added a mouse to a 3270.

Let me explain.  See in the 1980’s, Reagan was President, the K-Car was still new, and email was yet to be thought of, my first job was working for Controllers systems in Prudential building, yes I said building, a G/L system.  We used mainframes, COBOL and IDMS Network Databases.  The user interface was a mean green 3270 terminal.

Fast forward to 2006, any cool application built today is web-based, with nothing running on the client.  Well, to me this is very similar to the 3270, except now I have a mouse to click on things instead of PF Keys and arrows.

I am not complaining.   If I never see, or have to lift, a 3270 again, I am fine, but it is a long winding journey to go from 3270 to client server to fat browser to thin browser.

The terminal is dead.   Long live the terminal (with mouse).

2006 was a year when some of the components of CPM all made headway in many orgranization and others seemed to stall. The proliferation of BI systems, even into new areas of the organization was very encouraging. The Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting (BP&F) systems, though, seemed to be status quo. Many of the vendors kept their promises in 2005 and before to buy the BP&F products to complete the suites. Scorecards, in particular the BSC, still are used in many companies, but they did not seem to span out to new areas.

The biggest suprise in 2006 was the non-pure-play BI vendors. Microsoft, centered around SQL 05, and Oracle, centered around Siebel analytics layed some serious groundwork for 2007 growth. More to come on this …..

The other looming collision is between Master Data Management (MDM) and CPM. Look for my article in BI Review and a Webcast with TDWI in Q1 2007 to address this issue.

Your thoughts? Was 2006 an uptick for CPM or not?

Are you managing performance always? Or are you managing performance all ways? Shouldn’t it be always all ways.

CPM = ( Performance ) * (A Squared)

Always, All Ways.