Performance Management Links Strategy And Operations
Tools go beyond BI to give decision makers at all levels the data they need to make the right business decisions.
By Doug Henschen, InformationWeek
Nov. 22, 2008
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212101182
Companies can't report their way to great results--though you wouldn't know it from their accumulation of underused reports and dashboards. Companies that get this critical point are moving away from IT-centric business intelligence programs and toward results-focused performance management.
True, BI does more than just generate reports. But add in query and analysis tools, and sophisticated predictive and statistical analytics, and those tools and technologies are overwhelmingly under IT's control. In contrast, performance management, or PM, is defined by business needs, providing decision makers with the data they need to make the right moves, ones that fit with company strategy.
Most often, companies incorporate performance management into their budgeting and financial processes, in what's called corporate or financial PM. The next step is operational PM, where they apply BI to practical, day-to-day decisions--in the supply chain, sales, customer service, and other areas.
That's what's happening at United Agri Products, a unit of $5 billion-a-year chemical and fertilizer supplier Agrium, which started doing operational PM projects last year using Cognos' BI platform. "After years of IT preaching the value of BI to business, we reached a point of maturity where the roles started to reverse, and the business started coming to us with ideas," says David Wheat, UAP's director of decision-support systems.
UAP's director of operations brought one ...