It’s been an interesting journey. In the six years since the magazine was founded, I’ve developed an enormous appreciation for the benefits that business performance management (BPM) software and process upgrades can bring to finance departments and the businesspeople they support.

I’ve talked to hundreds of finance pros, budget managers, and IT experts who were involved in moving their company from spreadsheet-based planning and management reporting processes to specialized BPM software. Some simply installed dashboards to help executives monitor actuals vs. budget in real time (or at least bring them closer to real time), while others completely rethought their performance management oversight and analysis activities.

Almost without fail, these folks have explained to me how thrilled they are that they undertook the BPM upgrade process. Some faced challenges in the purchase and implementation of the software, or in their utilization of professional services, but most also saw dramatic reductions in the amount of time wasted within their company and substantial improvements in the quality of planning and overall business decisions.

Their stories have made me a believer in the value of BPM. I’m sad to say goodbye, but I’d like to thank everyone who has shared with me, over the years, either a hands-on case study or high-level insights into some facet of the market. You have all helped make BPM Express and BPM Magazine what they are.

That said, I’d like to use my last issue of BPM Express to reiterate what I’ve learned about this market, much of which is supported by the results of a recently released, very comprehensive survey report on the state of business intelligence (BI) today. (Read more below.)

Companies today expect to cut their costs aggressively in the near future; nevertheless, they foresee their profit margins eroding. And uncertainty about the future (and the best course forward) abounds. When asked, "How would you characterize the uncertainty facing your business?" only 5 percent of respondents selected "low." For 62 percent, the answer is "high" or "very high" — and that number jumps to 72 percent among respondents from companies over $500 million.

What's particularly interesting from a performance management perspective is how companies are dealing with this situation: They are planning more and more frequently. Twenty-five percent of companies have replanned, reforecasted, or created what-if scenarios four or more times within the last quarter alone. Another 8 percent have done so three times, and 23 percent have done so two times. More than half of companies have reforecasted at least twice within the last quarter. From the perspective of Adaptive Planning president and CEO Bill Soward, this move toward rolling forecasts is likely to outlast the economic downturn. "This is a cultural shift," he says. "Managing through uncertainty requires lots of shifts internally. I think this is going to become business as usual for a lot of these companies."

It’s been an interesting journey. In the six years since the magazine was founded, I’ve developed an enormous appreciation for the benefits that business performance management (BPM) software and process upgrades can bring to finance departments and the businesspeople they support.

I’ve talked to hundreds of finance pros, budget managers, and IT experts who were involved in moving their company from spreadsheet-based planning and management reporting processes to specialized BPM software. Some simply installed dashboards to help executives monitor actuals vs. budget in real time (or at least bring them closer to real time), while others completely rethought their performance management oversight and analysis activities.

Almost without fail, these folks have explained to me how thrilled they are that they undertook the BPM upgrade process. Some faced challenges in the purchase and implementation of the software, or in their utilization of professional services, but most also saw dramatic reductions in the amount of time wasted within their company and substantial improvements in the quality of planning and overall business decisions.

Their stories have made me a believer in the value of BPM. I’m sad to say goodbye, but I’d like to thank everyone who has shared with me, over the years, either a hands-on case study or high-level insights into some facet of the market. You have all helped make BPM Express and BPM Magazine what they are.

That said, I’d like to use my last issue of BPM Express to reiterate what I’ve learned about this market, much of which is supported by the results of a recently released, very comprehensive survey report on the state of business intelligence (BI) today. The experiences of the many BPM users who’ve taken the time to speak with me over the past six years are underlined by the results of 2008’s BI Survey 8. The research draws on 2,600 survey responses from both businesspeople and IT professionals (a surprising 42 percent of respondents have job descriptions that include both business and IT responsibilities).

A major takeaway from BI Survey 8’s findings is a ranking of BI’s biggest benefits, and the top scorers should come as no surprise to BPM Express readers: “faster or more accurate reporting” and “better business decisions.” For each possible benefit that the survey questionnaire listed, respondents were asked to select whether the benefit had been proven and quantified in their organization; proven but not measured; formally claimed, but not verified; informally suspected; not achieved; or made worse by the BI software project. Three-quarters of respondents said their organization’s reporting has been proven to have improved; nearly 40 percent of them have quantified the improvement. And more than half of respondents’ organizations have proven that their business decisions are better as a result of their BI efforts. Only a quarter of organizations have proven that their BI project actually increased revenue, but clearly these initiatives are delivering substantial rewards. Fewer than 5 percent of respondents believe that their project has not resulted in better reporting and better business decisions.

Moreover, almost 30 percent of respondents said their BI project has either met or exceeded its goals, and another 44 percent said it has “largely met” its goals. Slightly over 7 percent said the project hasn’t met their goals at all, which perhaps can be explained by the fact that 5.3 percent purchased the software within the previous three months and 11.4 percent within the six-month period leading up to the survey.

The survey revealed that several factors affect a BI project’s chance for success: Being led by business end users or by specialist BI consultants gives an initiative the best chance for meeting its goals and achieving business benefits; being led by consultants from the software vendor or by a large, general-purpose consulting firm makes it far less likely to succeed. Likewise, the faster the implementation process is, the more likely the project is to meet its goals. Projects that took longer than two years to be completed were highly likely to fail. The survey found very little correlation between the size of the license fees a project entails and the project’s likelihood to achieve business goals.

Performance management and business intelligence are important processes in the functioning of an organization, and making these processes as effective as possible has widely proven benefits for the quality of corporate decision-making. Running a business well relies on good BI.

Meg Waters
Editor in Chief, BPM Magazine