Blog: Craig Schiff

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February 7, 2008

Aren't Things Confusing Enough Already?

Companies evaluating business performance management (BPM) solutions in 2008 are still trying to make sense of all of 2007's mergers and acquisitions. Which vendor owns which products? Will all of these sometimes overlapping products survive? Do I need to own the transactional and/or BI products from a vendor to get the full benefits of their BPM solution? What is the timeline for integration? While BPM prospects are pondering these issues they don't need anything else to muddy the waters. Well, along comes IDS Scheer with an attempt to ride the performance management wave that can only serve to further confuse prospects.

I saw this press release today and it bothered me. They are experts in 'the other BPM', business process management. It's bad enough the acronyms are the same, but do they have to co-opt the words 'performance management' as well? The theme of their conference is 'Improve Business Performance'. There will be a discussion of how BPM = process = performance. The new version of their product will be labeled the business performance edition. They optimize business processes and workflows which certainly is of major importance to most companies. In effect, they improve the performance of these business processes. However, it is not business performance management - aligning a company around the corporate strategy and measuring and managing the execution of that strategy. I think with this marketing approach they are doing a great disservice to prospects of both BPMs and will be setting false expectations. What do you think?

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