CPO Blog

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.