Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Five Key Takeaways from the 2006 BPM Pulse Survey

Published: September 11, 2006

The 2006 BPM Pulse Survey of 500 business and IT professionals provided interesting insights into perceptions and plans for business performance management.

Takeaway #1: Everybody’s Doing It
Those without a performance project are clearly in the minority, with just 17% reporting no plans, down from 26% a year earlier. One common reason cited for no plans is that they simply have other priorities. Of those moving forward with business performance management (BPM), the majority (55%) claim to be in the midst of the project already. It should also be noted that only a small fraction – 13% – deem their project complete. This is due to both the general youth of business performance management and the fact that a typical project often has many phases: budgeting, consolidation and reporting, dashboards and operational analytics.

Takeaway #2: Budgeting is Still King of BPM
When asked to select the component(s) of business performance management they are focusing on, the majority chose budgeting and planning. This has been the case since the start of our survey several years ago. It’s not surprising for two main reasons. The first is pain. Many companies are still using Excel for budgeting and have long ago outgrown it. It creates a labor-intensive, error-prone budgeting process that fails to meet expectations. Until BPM came along, there were not too many alternatives. The other reason budgeting tops the list is that it is a key foundation element for BPM. How are you going to use a dashboard to see how you’ve performed if you don’t have a set of targets (the budget) to compare your actual results against? Operational analytics has been number two on the list for two years running and signals the beginning of a focus on Performance Management 2.0.

Takeaway #3: The BPM Vendors are Listening
We first started collecting vendor satisfaction ratings in 2005. The initial results were disappointing. Most vendors received mediocre ratings. We since met with many of the vendors to review our findings. Surprisingly, very few were defensive, and several owned up to what they believed to be the cause of their less-than-stellar ratings. Lo and behold, a year later almost all ratings are up, in some cases significantly. This bodes well for the vendors, as well as for BPM itself. However, an area still rated low fairly consistently is documentation. If you have ever used any kind of software, you probably already knew that. As the products become more intuitive, workflow-based, and as interfaces become more user familiar, this issue will become less and less important.

Takeaway #4: Users are Ready for More
As good as today’s solutions are, users have a strong interest in several newer focus areas. They are anxious to see metadata management capabilities built into the products. Even if the vendor offers a truly unified solution (which also ranked high on the list), there is still the need to synchronize charts of accounts, organizational hierarchies and other BPM metadata with source systems. Driver-based planning is also a highly desirable capability. This mirrors the way many businesses do their planning; and the more out-of-the-box functionality that supports their internal processes, the better. The last of the top interest areas is predictive analytics. Based on the way various vendors have positioned this capability, I’ll bet that not every survey respondent has the same understanding of what predictive analytics involves. Despite that, there is high interest in a reliable system that enables users to predict the probable outcomes of business decisions more accurately.

Takeaway #5: BI+BPM is the Way to Go
What is the source of BPM solutions? While some users get their performance capabilities from a business intelligence (BI) tools vendor and others get it from a BPM application vendor, a vendor that offers both is the clear favorite. Since end user self-sufficiency is a highly desirable aspect of BPM, ERP vendors as a source is in the minority, unless the ERP vendor has an established support environment already in place with a particular client. The obvious reason for the success of BPM applications is that they contain deep domain expertise, and there is no reason for you to have to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, BI tools let you further customize and expand upon these applications to meet your company’s unique needs.

To get your own copy of selected 2006 BPM Pulse Survey results, click here. In addition, watch this space for an opportunity to have your voice heard in the 2007 BPM Pulse Survey, which will start later this year.

If you found this article helpful and would like to receive the latest insights each month from Craig Schiff and other experts featured on the Business Intelligence Network, please subscribe to the Business Performance Management Newsletter.