In the 2010 BPM Pulse Survey we asked a number of questions to determine where business performance management (BPM) fell on the priority list at most organizations. While the survey is still ongoing, with more than 500 responses already in we can take a meaningful initial read on this topic. One question asked if respondents thought BPM was essential, nice to have, or a luxury. Almost 60% responded that is was essential (only 5% called it a luxury for those with resources to spare). Another more telling question required the ranking of 7 different enterprise systems in terms of their importance to the organization. While ERP came out on top, BPM was right behind. It was ahead of customer relationship management, business intelligence, governance, risk, and compliance, business process management (the other BPM), and HR systems. This survey will remain open through the end of this month. If you would like to add your two cents and get a copy of the survey results report when available go here.

Every January we unveil our list of the 'core' business performance management (BPM) vendors for the year. Out of the 100+ vendors we follow in the space, we select the subset that we deem to be the most successful (in terms of client success, not just sales success) and that have the widest appeal. It is our belief that prospective clients would do well to include these vendors on their shortlists, assuming of course that they fit in with their overall business requirements. For 2010 the BPM Partners list of core vendors includes (in alphabetical order): Acorn, Adaptive Planning, Carpio, IBM Cognos, Infor, Longview, myDials, Prophix, Oracle, SAP/BusinessObjects, SAS, and Tagetik. We officially unveiled this list last week in our annual Beyond the Hype webcast. You can replay it now to see the detailed information on each vendor along with customer satisfaction data (where available), and 'best fit' analysis for each.

Those of us who work with business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) on a daily basis strongly believe that they provide great value to the companies that implement them. The challenge always is how to measure the bottom line impact of the benefits produced. How do you quantify the value of better access to information and enhanced decision-making capabilities? I don't really know the answer, but the guys at Nucleus Research make a living doing just that - calculating the return on investment (ROI) of technology projects. I found their recent case study on one of BPM Partners clients, Martin's Point Health Care, of particular interest because of the large ROI and fast payback they uncovered in this BI/BPM project. Hopefully this analysis and others like it can help convince some of the many companies putting other priorities ahead of BI/BPM to move these projects up the list.

Sure they have a common enemy in Oracle and have targeted them before, but this recent announcement is around business performance management (BPM). More specifically budgeting, planning and consolidation. That would mean the Oracle/Hyperion product set and the product set that SAP/BusinessObjects acquired with OutlookSoft. Both companies have very strong offerings in this area. Microsoft had a solid offering of its own in this area, PerformancePoint, which they backed away from. That probably made sense because it was still many versions away from truly competing with the established players. The OutlookSoft product set was designed from the ground up to support and take advantage of Microsoft technologies so SAP is a logical partner for Microsoft in this area. What does this mean though for other BPM vendors with Microsoft-based solutions? Whatever happens, the fact that budgeting and planning is the new battleground says a lot about the growing importance of business performance management.

This is BPM Partners' annual comprehensive survey on business performance management (BPM). It focuses on the applications and technologies that make up BPM as well as vendor-specific customer satisfaction ratings for those respondents that have already selected a vendor. All respondents receive the full results report as well as a gift. The first 200 also get a Starbucks card. If you have the 10-15 minutes required you can take the survey now, or just review last year's results here.

The whole 'balloon boy' incident proved just how gullible and trusting we are. It also showed how ready some people are to take advantage of that trust. When scientists later pointed out how it would have been physically impossible for the balloon to carry the boy's weight it made clear how little most of us understand about simple technologies that are not part of our own daily lives. Which brings me to Business Performance Management (BPM). No matter how smart they may be in other areas, BPM is relatively new to most companies. They learn as they go and most of that learning comes from vendor interactions. While most BPM vendors know their stuff, there are a handful that are way off base. Their view of what BPM is about is far outside the norm and of course is tailored specifically to match their offerings. It is possible they may not even know they are missing the boat, but I don't think so. However, if you work with these vendors exclusively for BPM it is highly unlikely you will end up getting the full potential value out of BPM. At least three specific vendors fall into this group and they are all primarily business intelligence (BI) vendors. Great at BI, out of touch on BPM. It is inappropriate to name them in this public forum, but if your BPM vendor is primarily a BI vendor, proceed with caution and take advantage of outside guidance and expertise.

At least one vendor I am aware of is offering a no strings attached, totally free, SaaS performance dashboard. I have a problem with that. You might reasonably wonder why, after all how bad could it be if it didn't cost anything? If it doesn't work out you could just get rid of it, no harm done.Well, in fact it could do harm. Let me explain.

While there are some performance management vendors who show up in every deal, and others who show up in selected deals, there is one vendor who almost never shows up in the competitive marketplace anymore. What makes this particularly unusual is that they are sizeable, have been around a long time, and used to show up regularly.

We have just finished analyzing and have started to release the results of the 2009 BPM Pulse survey. This year's survey, 'Performance Management Goes Mainstream', added questions about the impact the economy was having on the survey respondent's BPM plans. In addition it included questions about project status and overall satisfaction with BPM. The good news for vendors, consultants, and most importantly, end users of performance management is that satisfaction is high and the rough economy is driving more people to invest in BPM, not less. You can view this graphically here. In addition, a summary whitepaper with information on business needs driving adoption, feature/functionality priorities, areas of focus for operational analysis, spending plans, etc. is available here.

The holy grail of business performance management (BPM) is to compensate people based on their achievement of corporate, departmental, and individual goals and objectives. While BPM is good at measuring progress against objectives, it is of little value if it doesn't change people's behavior, which in turn should help improve the bottom line. Incentive compensation based on what is being measured by the BPM system is a way to do that. Until now there have been two main roadblocks to implementation of this approach: culture and technology.