Performance Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Business Intelligence’

The interplay between Business Intelligence and Performance Management in today’s organizations

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Many business users still rely today on spreadsheets, presentations and e-mail as their tools for information and analysis, despite major investments in technology and their willingness to manage or improve organizational performance.

A new study by Ventana Research, “Business Intelligence and Performance Management for the 21st Century“, reveals that these desktop productivity tools obstruct efficiency and effectiveness when used in enterprise processes.

The Findings

Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to assess the current state of maturity, trends and best practices. The goal was to determine how organizations approach Business Intelligence (BI) and performance management and prioritize their key components by identifying what elements they desire in a comprehensive approach.

The research found strong interest in a growing demand for BI and performance management. Departmentally, the most growth in adoption of BI tools to support performance management has been in Operations (51%), Finance (50%) and Customer Management (49%).

Source: UBM TechWeb Reader Services, 2010

However, the research paints a picture of a market in an early stage of development. It shows that most organizations face considerable obstacles. They have only basic BI capabilities such as:

querying sources for specific data (74%),
generating reports from data (74%)
accessing data from a spreadsheet for further analysis (70%).

Moreover, the capabilities they currently are working to deploy are only somewhat more sophisticated:

communicating data in the right format (27%),
searching for data (26%),
presenting data effectively (25%)
creating measures and metrics (24%).

Organizations are aware that more advanced capabilities exist; the ones our participants said most often that they hope to establish are being able to access data via a mobile device (27%), to conduct what-if analysis (25%) and to collaborate on data and metrics (23%).

The research shows that lack of resources (60%) and lack of a budget (43%) are the two most common barriers to improving BI and performance management. A significant percentage of the participants said that in the next year or two they will choose hosted software managed off-site, or rented software as a service (SaaS), as the means of deploying such software.

These methods can be more economical than the traditional on-premises deployment and require fewer in-house resources such as hardware and IT staff.

What To Do Next

According with the research, organizations can follow a series of steps as presented below:

1. Assess your organization’s maturity in BI and performance management.

2. Consider the effectiveness of your current tools and applications.

3. Reduce the number of BI tools and the use of spreadsheets.

4. Compare the BI capabilities you have with those you want.

5. Determine whether products currently in use can handle performance management well.

6. Identify the types of data you need to access and analyze.

7. Consider adopting or expanding metrics for performance management.

8. Address organizational barriers to improving BI and performance management.

9. Look into alternative means of software deployment

10. Examine software that can be deployed across roles in the enterprise.

References:

UBM TechWeb Reader Services, 2010, 10 Steps to 21st Century BI & Performance Management , available at http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/channels/performance_management/corporate/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=2MNI1FW0ZFYGNQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?articleID=225200684&pgno=4, accessed 08 June 2010

Tags: BI, Business Intelligence, Metrics, Performance Measures
Posted in Business Intelligence, Performance Management | No Comments »

Microsoft Excel – the most popular Performance Management and Business Intelligence tool

Friday, March 12th, 2010

smartKPIs.com Performance Architect update 10/2010

Since its launch on a Windows platform in 1987, Microsoft Excel has gradually become omnipresent on business desktop environments. It is widely used in businesses of all sizes for data management, analysis and reporting. In a way, it can be considered the first Business Intelligence (BI) software product mass marketed.

Almost since its launch, Excel’s position in the market has been challenged by various products with advanced data integration and analysis functionality. Together, they formed the basis of the today’s BI market, by going through several successive phases:

1987-1996 Formation – initial product launches
1996-2005 Growth – product maturity and market formation
2005-2010 Consolidation – by various mergers and acquisitions involving the major software producers in the world.

In recent years, a trend that starts to get wide acceptance in the market is the move from desktop installed products to online service delivery. Software as a Service (SaaS) is largely facilitated by technology advancements such as cloud computing.

There are indeed products in the market with more features, more robust and integrated. However, considering the estimated number of 500 million users, Microsoft Excel can still be considered the most popular performance management and business intelligence tool in use today.

So what makes it so popular?

It is not expensive, at under $350.
Most users are already familiar with its basic functionality.
It makes sharing of data easy due to its widespread use.

The main drawbacks of using Excel as a BI tool are:

Data reliability – spreadsheets are error prone due to human error
Lack of advanced collaboration features
Limited advanced reporting functionality

This is the traditional way of assessing Excel, by looking at its reporting functionality, through the BI lens. Some of the additional benefits of using Excel form a Performance Management perspective are:

Supports creativity, as it can be used as a canvas for developing visual constructs. While it doesn’t have advanced visualization options, it offers vast screen real-estate for structuring data.
Useful communication tool, as it provides a structured approach to presenting information. Reports can be structured by hyperlinking tabs and combining text with graphs and pictures.
It is easy to use, basic user functionality requiring no training. Configuration is straightforward and the visual interface relatively user-friendly.

Overall, due to its versatility, Microsoft Excel is here to stay. Its availability in an online format and the upcoming release of the 2010 version of the software are interesting new developments in this success story.

Stay smart! Enjoy smartKPIs.com!

Aurel Brudan
Performance Architect,
www.smartKPIs.com

Tags: Business Intelligence, Microsoft Excel, tool
Posted in Business Intelligence, Performance Architect update, Performance Management, Performance Measurement, smartKPIs.com | No Comments »