Blog: Craig Schiff

« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »

August 29, 2006

Analyst Brain Drain

What is going on with the Business Intelligence/Business Performance Management analysts at the major IT advisory firms? Many seasoned thought leaders are either changing firms or joining the vendor community. Howard Dresner and Frank Buytendijk left Gartner for senior strategy roles at Hyperion. Lee Geischecker recently left Gartner for another advisory firm (where I would guess she will be under some form of non-compete for a period of time). I am also aware of senior analysts at two other firms getting ready to make a move as well. One is planning to join a vendor, the other has not finalized their plans yet. Maybe these analysts are looking to round out their resumes, or maybe they were made offers too good to pass up. Regardless, the impact on vendors, the IT media, and end user organizations could be significant. The number of unbiased, knowledgeable experts to call upon for guidance and opinions will be greatly reduced. Some of these analysts will be replaced, in other cases research areas will be consolidated. In either case there will initially be 'green' analysts learning the space. The few seasoned experts left standing will be in high demand. Factor this in to your analyst usage plans for the next 6-9 months.

Share:

August 15, 2006

Free BPM: Open Source Comes to Performance Management

Open source has been successful in the infrastructure and tools market. Pentaho brought the open source model to business intelligence which often forms the foundation for business performance management (BPM) solutions. Now a BPM applications vendor, Adaptive Planning, has taken it one step further - they are delivering an end to end BPM/BI solution stack using Pentaho's BI platform, data integration, reporting & analysis, and dashboards. Adaptive Planning will provide the domain specific performance applications such as planning, budgeting, and consolidation and pre-defined metrics. This solution also utilizes Oracle Database XE, Apache, and Linux. The end result is what I believe to be the first (but I'm sure it won't be the last) complete open source performance management solution. The goal is a more affordable, higher quality, community-driven solution. If successful, this can make performance management more accessible and bring its benefits to many more organizations, particularly in the mid-market. To that end there is even a free version (Express Edition) available for download. It is fully functional and can be used to meet a company's performance needs. This of course raises the question, how will Adaptive Planning make money? The answer is that they hope some percentage of Express Edition users will move to their Corporate and Enterprise editions which bundle in vendor support, a step-up feature set, and legal protections (such as indemnity) often required by larger companies for their mission critical applications. Whatever the outcome for Adaptive Planning from this initial foray by a BPM vendor into open source, end users will benefit by having a new cost -effective alternative. Other vendors may follow suit over time, if not with product than with new pricing models to address some of the price pressure this solution should bring to the BPM marketplace.

Share:

August 3, 2006

Does the Balanced Scorecard Deliver Value?

Let me start by answering my own question: yes it does. The real question is - does it deliver enough value to justify its costs in time and resources and consulting dollars. As the KPI (key performance indicator) development practice has grown at BPM Partners I have seen numerous companies consider the Balanced Scorecard methodology. Many others have proceeded to develop KPIs without using this approach. Here's the thing that troubles me: those that have adopted the Balanced Scorecard methodology have taken much longer to reap the rewards. In at least one instance it has delayed the start of the project by a year - the customer in this case views it as a large undertaking and just hasn't had the bandwidth to focus on it, so nothing has happened. In that same time period many other customers who have chosen not to pursue the Balanced Scorecard approach have developed their KPIs, loaded up their dashboards with them , and now are running the business with a new focus on performance. Don't get me wrong, the Balanced Scorecard does many things right including getting you to balance your internal and external focus and looking at both leading and lagging indicators. However, with the appropriate knowledge and guidance you can do much of that without all the rigor and investment required. I'd be interested to hear from those of you that have implemented dashboards to learn whether or not you used the Balanced Scorecard approach, how long your project took, and how successful you feel it was in the end.

Share: