News & Views

June 2, 2011 from BusinessFinance – “It’s rare a singular metric like turnover or a customer survey score is by itself a good measure of an organization’s performance. Most of the more meaningful measures on dashboards of executives today are indices, made up of three to five submeasures. I review the nine most useful and creative performance measures I have seen in government and business organizations over the last few years…”

180 View – The article does contain a few good ideas such as a Distraction index which summarizes employee time in 3 categories – Job (Tasks that are directly part of doing one’s job), Administration and Programs (Projects).

I teach a graduate course which includes performance metrics. The theory is that metrics should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. Without being specific, the numbers are ambiguous and there can be many ways to interpret the results. You should not choose metrics that can’t be measured accurately or take a huge effort to obtain. Actionable means that the metric is easily understood and that it ties back to a specific team that is being measured. Relevant metrics are linked to strategy. Companies that need to wait a month or more for their metrics are in deep trouble. Real-time should be the goal, but accuracy objectives will cause delays.

Financial metrics are inherently lagging indicators, which tell you about historical results – sales, gross profit … The most important metrics are leading indicators, which foreshadow things that could happen. For example rising error rates in shipping or longer time to ship often precede declining customer sales.

January 2011 from Aberdeen Group – “Today’s business decision maker faces a conundrum that challenges even the most analytical minds. In one hand, more data is available to support business intelligence (BI) tools and techniques than ever before… On the other hand, that growth in data volume and complexity can become the enemy of expedience…

The research shows that by delivering on-time business insight, these top performers are able to drive substantial performance improvement in key operational metrics…”

180 View – The article does make a number of good points. In our software selection projects, BI is always included as a requirement. The vendors often show multiple BI tools providing different and overlapping views of information. The pendulum has swung from not enough BI to too much. The article also pushes the notion that real-time or close to real-time information is the way to go.

November 21, 2011 from InformationWeek – “Business intelligence vendors keep adding social features–but how many interfaces does it take to get everybody on the same page?…

The concept is to let practitioners share dashboards, reports and data visualizations, promote discussion and capture comments and interpretations from a variety of stakeholders. There’s data and then there’s insight, and real insight can be greatly improved by healthy debate among people with different skills and perspectives…”

180 View – An example of a collaboration requirement we often encounter when working with our clients is the ability to add comments to explain variances. You would think this would be easy with all the collaboration tools.

July 11, 2011 from Director of Finance online – “…most CFOs now view information as a major asset justifying significant investment, and many believe that they can now manage information better. As the CFO becomes more strategically involved with enabling all departments to work towards the strategic objectives of the business, sharing information across multiple departments is becoming increasingly important in order to create a performance management culture as well as framework that sits across the whole enterprise rather than just in the area of Finance. Strategy mapping can be coordinated across an organisation and tactics/objectives developed by function and tracked in real-time departmentally as well as on a group basis…”

180 View – CFO’s are investing in business intelligence systems for finance. The same tools need to be extended to operations with CFO’s shining the lights on the numbers.

July 6, 2011 from Computerworld – “For years, business intelligence and analytics tools seemed out of the reach of midmarket users. Complex and costly systems that required hardware, software, licensing and special skills were beyond the budgets and in-house IT talent pools of most midsize companies. But nowadays, with vendors offering lighter versions of their products and the rise of software as a service (SaaS), BI has become accessible to companies that previously might not have been able to afford it…”

180 View – Business Intelligence (BI) is another technology term that is confusing and has multiple meanings. We define it as turning data into information that is useful in making decisions. Our perspective is that BI can be accomplished with a spectrum of technologies including traditional reports. However today, BI usually refers to Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Dashboards and Ad-Hoc Reporting. In our ERP selection projects, BI is always a significant component and all the vendors include BI in one form or another.

April 18, 2011 from strategy+business – “Many executives think of business intelligence (BI) merely as a software solution that needs to be bought and installed, a reporting tool for serving up data on a convenient “dashboard.” As a result of this misperception — and despite the significant procurement, installation, and maintenance costs — BI systems often generate inaccurate data or distract employees by delving too deeply into corporate minutiae. Gartner Inc., an IT research and advisory firm, predicts that through 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions because they lack the right information, processes, and tools…”

180 View – You don’t need to be implementing a business intelligence system to benefit from the ideas in this article.

April 2011 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Welcome to our 2011 survey on corporate performance (CPM), budgeting and business intelligence (BI). When we ran our first BI survey back in 2004, it was all on its own. But surveys have a way of morphing from year to year, gathering and discarding functions and products as they go. So it is that by 2006, our BI survey had been more or less taken over by corporate performance management (CPM).  Now, in a further evolution, our roundup encompasses both products, plus budgeting…”

April 2011 – We have now expanded out Systems Analysis Tool to include Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management and Budgeting. By completing a brief survey, we will provide you with the top 10 systems that meet your profile and requirements. Systems included are Actuate, Adaptive Planning, BizTools, Dynac, Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager, Indicee, Information Builders, Intellicus, myDIALS, Planning Maestro, Prophix, Style Intelligence, Infor PM, TARGIT and Yellowfin. If you know of other systems that should be included, please let the vendors know that they should contact 180 Systems.

February 1, 2011 from InformationWeek – “…IBM, Oracle and SAP (along with Microsoft) remain in the analyst firm’s prized upper-right Leaders Quadrant. And they still dominate BI marketshare, the report finds. But non-IT buyers are gravitating to easy-to-use data discovery tools, which moved up in the report…

“These data discovery alternatives to traditional BI platforms offer highly interactive and graphical user interfaces built on in-memory architectures to address business users’ unmet ease-of-use and rapid deployment needs,” Gartner reports…”

180 View – You can also read the entire Gartner report compliments of SAS, which placed in the leaders quadrant. From SAS’s website, there is a link to http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/sas/vol8/article2/article2.html. Gartner is a good place to start when considering investing in enterprise software. As you will see, there are many highly rated business intelligence systems making it a challenge to pick the right one for your company. We will be publishing our own survey in April through the CAmagazine, which will contain additional information on many of the leading business intelligence systems.

November 29, 2010 from Dashboard Insight – “When looking at the BI landscape and available solutions, dashboards give the biggest bang for their buck. After all, with high levels of interactivity, strong data visualizations, and general capabilities that provide the quickest way to monitor performance and manage what is happening within the organization, it stands to reason that dashboard use would be gaining in popularity.  Despite the positive aspects of making BI and analytics easier to access and to interact with, the reality is that effective dashboards don’t design themselves. Simply implementing a dashboard and monitoring metrics does not mean that decision makers will benefit from their use.  Businesses require an effective action plan that ties into the organization’s vision in order to drive long-term success…

180 View – There is some useful discussion. I would add that metrics should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. Without being specific, the numbers are ambiguous and there can be many ways to interpret the results. You should not choose metrics that are can’t be measured accurately or take a huge effort to obtain. Actionable means that the metric is easily understood and that it ties back to a specific team that is being measured. Relevant metrics are linked to strategy. Companies that need to wait a month or more for their metrics are in deep trouble. Real-time should be the goal, but accuracy objectives will cause a delay to make sure the numbers are right. You should be shooting for days – not weeks.

As well some measurements are inherently lagging indicators, which tell you about historical results – sales, gross profit, customer satisfaction… The most important metrics are leading indicators, which foreshadow things that could happen. For example rising error rates in shipping or longer time to ship often precede declining customer satisfaction.

October 21, 2010 from ComputerWorld – “Clarity Systems, based in Toronto, has some 600 customers around the world. Its software includes Clarity 7, which provides financial budgeting, planning, forecasting and analysis capabilities. The company also sells Clarity FSR, a product that helps finance departments handle regulatory reporting and filing requirements.  The company will be rolled into IBM’s analytics software portfolio. Big Blue has spent more than $14 billion on analytics acquisitions and related activities in the past four years, according to a statement…”

180 View – This acquisition probably happened because of one of our recent system selection projects ended up with Clarity selected over Cognos. One reason for the decision was the unified approach by Clarity meaning sharing of one database and one user interface for all requirements. Cognos needed a number of products to meet our client’s requirements at that time.

October  18, 2010 from Accountancy Age – “…Despite a combined annual worldwide investment of US$60 billion in BI solutions, half of all BI projects fail according to KPMG-commissioned research from the University of Cambridge…

BI projects are often mistakenly seen as purely technology based, with ownership limited to IT specialists within the business instead of being embedded throughout the organization…”

180 View – There are other reasons given in the article and some suggestions that may be a little helpful. Things are changing fast in the Business Intelligence (BI) world. The thinking today is that BI is not just for the big companies or for the management team. It’s now BI for the masses. It is also needs to be easily consumed by all the non techies. It needs to be inexpensive to buy/rent, use and deploy. There are lots of good systems to consider – too many in fact. Our BI portal (http://www.cpm180systems.com/) has some suggestions for you. Our portal is a self-service and BI vendors and implementers can register and provide basic or detailed information about their product/company.

2010 from SearchDataManagement – “…This directory is designed to be a valuable resources for this getting started with research or evaluating vendors in the business intelligence market. Inside, you’ll find basic information about the major vendors in the business intelligence market and the products they sell. Each listing is accompanies by a short description and a long description including limited information about the functionality and product use…”

180 View – There are 26 products and 28 pages of information in the article

April 20, 2010 from Forbes – “…Cognos was one of the leading makers of business intelligence software, and IBM paid $5 billion for it. IBM wrote another check last year for $1.2 billion to add SPSS, a predictive analytics and data mining company, to what was becoming a growing family of tools for organizing data into useful information. Ashe said IBM’s services arm is also working with 4,000 consultants, getting them to promote better analytics by IBM customers.

What is behind this growth in business analytics? Ashe says it reflects a demand from customers who, after spending years creating systems to record data and transactions, want to get more mileage out of that information. Businesses want information that is more timely and useful, particularly if it can feed directly into growth and profitability…”

180 View – Just about every organization struggles with getting useful information from its ERP system. Yes there are BI tools from some of the ERP vendors but IBM is ERP agnostic.