Blog: Craig Schiff

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June 6, 2007

BPM/CPM Plays to Packed House

I just returned from CFO Magazine's Corporate Performance Management Conference in New York. Due to a torrential downpour the first morning I arrived a few minutes late and ended up having to stand as there were few if any open seats left. I would estimate that the room was packed with about 175 to 200 finance managers and executives (not as big as many IT events, but large for this type of audience). The crowd was very engaged and taking copious notes. I was the second speaker that morning and after my speech numerous people came up to me to ask for guidance on how to address their performance needs. Since most performance management projects still start in the finance department all of this bodes very well for continued momentum in performance management..

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April 10, 2007

Using Non-Financial Measures Still a Challenge

More and more business executives, as well as their boards, are recognizing the importance of balancing financial measures of performance with non-financial ones. While financial measures give an organization an understanding of its past performance (past year, quarter, month, week, etc.), non-financial measures (customer satisfaction, innovation, quality, employee turnover, etc.) can provide greater insight into potential future performance. However, companies are still struggling to move forward with these types of measures. The reasons are varied, but include: lack of adequate tools to obtain this data, skepticism related to importance/accuracy of these elements, highly confidential nature of certain measures. For true performance management these obstacles need to be overcome. This recent study by Deloitte outlines some of the key issues.

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October 7, 2005

Smart Companies, Foolish Choices

A recent interaction with a prospective customer has further shaken my faith in the ability of typical companies to 'do BPM right'. Unfortunately there is a growing stack of data indicating that while companies are happy with BPM, they are not necessarily happy with their vendors or the road they travelled to get there. Some supporting data can be found here. Now back to that prospect. What did he do that was so terrible? He is paying money to a consulting firm to help him select the best BPM solution. That's good. Unfortunately, the consulting firm he chose to help him do this is as biased as they come. What's worse, this is a common problem and a dirty little secret of the BPM world.

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August 24, 2005

RFP Madness

Everyone hates RFPs (Request for Proposal). The end users that send them out hate creating them and reviewing them. The vendors hate having to respond to them. They don't even accomplish much. Most vendors learned a long time ago that they need to find a way to say 'yes' to every question posed to them. So the end result is an unpleasant, costly, time consuming process, that leaves everyone back where they started: trying to reduce a long list of vendors to a short list. Since this process has been so ineffective I can't understand why it is now spreading.

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