Business Performance Management

Symphony Metreo has released enhancements to its pricing-focused BI application, Metreo Vision. In the new version, dashboards are easier to customize and to export, and enhanced analysis functionality provides better insight into pricing using root-cause analysis techniques.

Last month, Panorama introduced a new analytics application for Google Docs. Late last week, the company announced that the product will include support for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

Last week, Actuate made available a new service pack (SP3) for the Actuate 9 business intelligence platform. SP3 focuses on improving Actuate 9’s ease of use and deployment. It incorporates report types from the latest release of the open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project (BIRT 2.2). It also includes iServer Express and enhancements to Actuate’s e.Reports and e.Spreadsheets.

Vanguard Business Analytics (a division of Exact Software) is offering a new version, 4.6, of its Vanguard Graphical Performance Series (GPS). This release includes an express user interface, a low-cost option for users who don’t need the full, multidimensional analysis capabilities of GPS’s business user or power user interfaces. Version 4.6 also includes a financial reporting and consolidation module, which simplifies the process of creating financial reports that involve consolidations.

Georgia-based Bitam is now offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of its performance management and business intelligence (BI) software platform. Through this hosted solution, customers will have access to all of Bitam’s performance management offerings — including its customizable dashboards — in a pay-as-you-go business model.

Information Builders has released a new product called WebFOCUS Performance Metrics Manager (PMM); it is designed to give organizations a low-cost solution for defining, tracking, and organizing their performance metrics. PMM provides data analysis, collaboration, and alert capabilities, and it enables users to monitor metrics through role-based dashboards. It comes with industry- and function-specific “starter kits” that are prepopulated with metrics in the areas of health care, banking, HR, IT, call center, and the supply chain.

Late last month, ActiveStrategy released version 7.0 of its ActiveStrategy Enterprise Balanced Scorecard software. This version overhauls the software’s Personal Goal Management feature, which explicitly ties employee goals to corporate strategy, and its Stoplight Charts, one of its data-visualization features. Version 7.0 also includes a new feature called Visual Maps, which enable users to upload images in jpeg, gif, or bitmap format and then populate those images with ActiveStrategy Enterprise objects. This means, for example, that a user could upload a graphic of a strategy map, then populate it with performance data that updates regularly. Plus, the software’s visual maps can link not only to Balanced Scorecard metrics, but also to processes, program groups, complete scorecards, or even other visual maps.

That may well be bad news for the bottom line. A study by the Hackett Group suggests that organizations that score well on Hackett’s evaluation of their IT business value management (BVM) processes perform much better than their peers across a range of financial metrics, including net profitability, return on assets, and return on equity. Perhaps most striking is the Hackett revelation that organizations in the Global 1000 which are best at IT BVM generate an annual operating profit $1.07 billion higher than that of their peers.

Board members may find alarming the results of a recent study conducted by Ventana Research — but the findings may not surprise finance professionals. Ventana’s survey found that only half of organizations’ financial plans are accurate, presumably due at least partly to the ineffectiveness of the companies’ budgeting and planning processes and the supporting software. Two-thirds of organizations are unable to delve into the details of their budgets in real time, and 59 percent of respondents reported using spreadsheets “heavily” in the budgeting process.

Along the same lines, a study conducted by the BPM Forum reveals that only 16 percent of companies find that their budgeted expenses come in on target, and that number drops to just 11 percent for budgeted revenues. Seventy-five percent of this survey’s respondents are still mired in spreadsheets, and more than 70 percent of respondents spend “inappropriate” amounts of time on budgeting.

This is the same story I’ve been reporting since the very beginning of this newsletter. Although more companies adopt sophisticated BPM processes and technologies every year, many continue to lag in their ability to manage their own performance.

A McKinsey global survey conducted in February reveals that corporate directors don’t feel they spend enough time developing the long-term strategies of their companies, and that they spend too much time dealing with issues such as compliance. They spend 24 percent of their time on strategic planning, 24 percent on execution in areas such as approval of mergers and acquisitions, 20 percent on performance management, and 11 percent on talent management. Yet boards spend 17 percent of their time on governance and compliance activities.

When asked whether they would like to increase or reduce the proportion of board time spent on specific strategy-related activities, 21 percent of respondents indicated that they’d like to increase the percentage of time they spend monitoring performance against strategy, while 29 percent would like to decrease it. Sixty-one percent feel they get good access to information about the company’s key performance indicators linked to strategy, while 19 percent feel information in this area is lacking.

At the same time, 53 percent of respondents would like to grow the proportion of time they spend developing long-term strategy, and 40 percent would like to increase the time dedicated to challenging their existing strategy. However, only 45 percent feel they have good access to information on leading indicators for the company and its competitors; 26 percent feel this information is inadequate.