Business Performance Management

You’ve likely heard by now about the sharp rise — and subsequent fall — of Nancy Killefer’s career trajectory in the Obama administration. The McKinsey & Co. consultant was nominated by President Obama to fill the role of chief performance officer (CPO) for the federal government, but she withdrew her name from contention amid controversy about her payment of taxes. Although she has disappeared from the spotlight, the position remains. Gary Cokins, the global product marketing manager for performance management at SAS, argued online last month that not only is “CPO” a position worth filling, but its existence at such a high level in the U.S. government gives the entire discipline of performance management a certain validation. “Some may argue,” Cokins says, “that creating one more C-suite position excessively distributes the responsibilities of the existing executive team.” However, research suggests that those companies which excel at performance management tend to implement offices of performance management and institute positions such as chief performance officer. Cokins and Bob Paladino — who at one time headed up the office of global performance for communications system provider Crown Castle International — explored this research in an August 2007 article for BPM Magazine. Today Cokins says that the research indicates “the … practice of establishing an OSM [Office of Strategy Management] and CPO is an accelerator to successful strategy achievement” — which he takes to mean that “President Obama’s approach by naming a CPO is effective.” If only the president could find someone with no tax problems to fill the job!

Before it was purchased by IBM, Cognos regularly offered new “blueprints,” models designed to jumpstart a BPM implementation project, either in a particular industry or within a particular corporate function. After the acquisition, however, blueprint generation ground to a halt. Until now. Last week, IBM Global Business Services and Cognos announced that they have teamed up to jointly release a blueprint focused on strategic investment management and decision support.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and CA have teamed up to jointly deliver PwC’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) consulting services with CA’s GRC Manager software. The companies are also offering a specialized joint solution focused on insurance companies that are facing the Model Audit Rule mandate for FY2010 financial reports.

A week ago, iDashboards and contact-center vendor Parallax Technologies announced a partnership designed to bring iDashboards’ data-visualization capabilities to Parallax customers. “The industry-leading dashboard technology from iDashboards, connected with Quality assurance, performance management, and customer satisfaction data that exists in Contact Centers will deliver great value to Parallax customers,” said Ernest LaBara, president of Parallax.

BI toolkit vendor BOARD International has released version 6.1 of its flagship product. This version is interoperable with OLAP databases from other vendors, including SAP, Microsoft, and Hyperion/Oracle. It also includes enhancements in security management, scalability, and database administration.

Early this month, Panorama released an upgrade to its NovaView business intelligence (BI) suite. Now, the functionality called SharedViews gives businesspeople who are not comfortable with BI technologies a better way to work with other users around the data in a NovaView report. Now, when a user presses a new “SharedViews” button within a NovaView report, the software rebuilds the report in a format that makes it accessible through Google Apps. And unlike a spreadsheet, SharedViews reports remain fully interactive; they’re still tied to the NovaView database.

SAS is offering a new release of its JMP statistical discovery software. Data analysis is easier in JMP 8 because the system’s new Graph Builder instantly revises a graph when the analyst drags and drops a new variable onto the graph. The software’s data visualization options include scatterplots, bar charts, trend lines, and histograms. In addition, among other new features, JMP 8’s “Choice” platform can generate surveys, and the software can handle multiple currency types in a single data table.

Last Wednesday, Business Objects released a new version of its BI OnDemand. Business Objects provides this full suite of business intelligence software (including data warehouse) via a hosted delivery model. The latest version helps users connect to both on-demand and on-premises data, and it comes with an accelerator to facilitate a data connection between BI OnDemand and Salesforce CRM.

As October’s The Latest Word explored, the global economic downturn doesn’t provide an excuse for companies to end efforts to innovate. In fact, innovation is even more important today than it was when things were going swimmingly. However, the downturn provides a great motivation for companies to evaluate whether they are innovating effectively.

A McKinsey survey conducted in October reveals that companies which carefully plan innovations see the most benefit from their innovations. Although only 5 percent of respondents said that innovation is not one of their organization’s top 10 priorities (for 65 percent, it was within the top three priorities), 16 percent of all respondents don’t use any metrics to monitor innovations. Seventy-one percent of organizations pursue product innovation, yet only 54 percent formally assess product innovation efforts. Likewise, the majority of companies pursue either service innovation (65 percent) and/or process innovation (62 percent), but only 37 percent formally assess innovation in these areas. This lack of measurement is a shame because among organizations that formally assess innovation, 30 percent said that more than 30 percent of their organization’s overall growth over the past five years is attributable to innovation. The survey indicates that the most effective way to achieve organic growth is to manage innovation investments as a portfolio and to use metrics to gauge the performance of the portfolio as a whole.

Late last week, the SEC proposed a road map leading to the filing of U.S. financial statements prepared in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The road map introduces “several milestones that, if achieved, could lead to the required use of IFRS by U.S. issuers in 2014 if the [SEC] believes it to be in the public interest and for the protection of investors.” The road map also includes proposed amendments to various regulations, rules, and forms through which U.S. issuers in industries that use IFRS as the basis of its financial reporting “more than any other set of standards” could begin IFRS-compliant SEC filings as early as 2010.

Also, as the SEC’s deadlines for mandatory filing of financial reports in extensible business reporting language (XBRL) draw near — large, accelerated filers are now expected to be required to file in XBRL starting early next year — XBRL US has formed a working group to act as an advisory team on prospective changes to the U.S. GAAP taxonomy. The group includes Landon Westerlund of KPMG, Lisa Nelson of Microsoft, Lou Rohman of Merrill Corp., Patricia LaValle of Ernst & Young, Glenn Doggett of the CFA Institute, and Simon Hecht of United Technologies Corp.