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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.