Last month in BPM Express, I talked about the fact that amid all the hype about integrated technologies and the oversized marketing budgets of the big players in the business performance management (BPM) space, many companies are still stuck in spreadsheet hell. They don’t need the complexity of a big-budget solution. They can pretty dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their performance management processes by implementing a very basic BPM application.
I believe that’s true for many companies. But I came across an interesting white paper this month that takes the opposite view. Companies that are going to do BPM, it argues, should aim to fully integrate their various technologies in order to synchronize data across planning, customer management, and operations. The white paper makes the point that decisions are better when companywide data is consistent — and it raises some questions companies should consider when shopping for performance management software today.
The white paper was put out by Ventana Research, and was sponsored by Cognos. One might expect it to be skeptical about Oracle and SAP’s claims that they have achieved full integration and all’s hunky-dory within their family of BPM products. It is. “Identifying fragmented performance management platform offerings can be difficult,” Ventana states. “The vendors have … pressure on their sales staffs to sell larger packages or more than one of their products. Hence you wind up in the crosshairs of extreme marketing, replete with words like ‘complete,’ ‘unified,’ ‘integrated,’ and other characterizations that aren’t precise or technically accurate and more often are matters of opinion.”
That’s strong language, but ever since the BPM megadeals of 2007, it has been hard to get a handle on exactly what products will be integrated, how integrated they’ll be, and when. The Ventana white paper offers advice on how to figure out the level of connectivity among different offerings from the same vendor. The first suggestion is to hire a consultant for professional guidance. This is, probably, the safest route. Another good suggestion is to ask the vendor to commit to a specified deployment schedule for the software, and then ask for customer references who can vouch for the vendor’s ability to meet its deadlines.
Moreover, Ventana recommends remaining skeptical throughout the process. “Can you actually achieve an integrated environment with disparate tools?” the white paper asks. “How do you weigh the fragmentation challenges of the vendor’s technology and the amount of implementation consulting required, which could heavily outweigh the cost of the software? … Ask, and be sure you understand, what levels of effort, time, and skill will be required to build and maintain disparate environments.”
Finally, Ventana advises, buyers need to dig beyond the vendor demos that are designed to show how integrated products are. Just because its dashboards are flexible and configurable doesn’t mean the data is seamlessly (or easily) integrated. In the end, buyers must do their best to evaluate their requirements for the software in the areas of installation, configuration, data modeling, user preparation, and readiness for business usage. Scrutiny of the vendor’s claims, in addition to testing with data integration top of mind, can give a company a better idea of how much integration a particular product offers.
To those readers who are braving today’s somewhat muddled market and investing in a major BPM suite: Drop me a line. I’d love to hear (and share) your techniques for evaluating how integrated the big vendors’ products really are.
