Blog: Craig Schiff

« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »

July 30, 2007

What's Next?

As we continue to work with vendors, end users, investors, and other industry experts we are getting a good sense of the next major trends in performance management. At the moment three particular areas stand out:

- Adoption by large companies. Specifically, some of the largest companies and best known brands are finally moving forward with business performance management (BPM). You may have thought that with all of their resources and massive amounts of data they would have been some of the first to pick up on BPM. However, their very size has held them back. The number of systems they have to deal with, the territoriality and politics around those systems, not to mention corporate bureaucracy has made this a very slow process for many companies. The good news is that most of them finally felt enough pain to bite the bullet and move forward. There are however still some big companies that are badly in need of performance management, but are so messed up they will not be moving forward anytime soon. There are BPM champions in those organizations to be sure, but they don't have the power and influence to cut through the politics and inertia.

- Adoption by small companies. I am amazed by the number of companies under 100 million, some even under 50 million who are now making the investment in BPM. Their focus tends to be more on just replacing the spreadsheet budgeting process, less on the strategic alignment aspects of BPM. One of the reasons more small companies are doing BPM now is that there is finally a good range of cost-effective options available for companies of their size. Some of the vendors they are looking at include Centage (Budget Maestro), Prophix, and Adaptive Planning. As a plus many of those vendors offer solutions that will grow with the company.

- In terms of features and functions the next major area to be tackled seems to be around enterprise risk management. Every major vendor has it on their radar screen. Some of the recent releases from companies like Cartesis/Business Objects address risk, but more as part of compliance initiatives. True risk management is much broader than that and its not just about planning for disaster or having enough insurance coverage. Its about understanding the company's risk strategy and evaluating business and investment decisions with that risk tolerance in mind. Venture capitalists are looking at the risk in their own investments and looking for a way to evaluate resiliency, the ability of a company to bounce back from a major disruption to its business. Its still early in terms of the automation of these types of analysis, but the need is clearly there today so I'm sure the solutions aren't far behind.

Share: