Business Objects Unveils Performance-Management ToolBusiness Objects Unveils Performance-Management Tool

Business Objects will strengthen its hand in the market for corporate performance-management software next week when it unveils BusinessObjects Performance Manager.

The new software is designed to help companies map relationships between strategic goals and employees' day-to-day activities. It has scorecard capabilities to give workers performance metrics that show whether they're meeting corporate objectives, and features to help managers and employees collaborate to identify and correct problems. The software can access analytical reports created with Business Objects and Business Objects WebIntelligence query-and-reporting tools.

The software's scorecard capabilities are more flexible than those that adhere to the rigorous "balanced scorecard" methodology and so should appeal to a broader range of companies--namely those that aren't interested in business process reengineering, says Philip Russom, a Forrester Research analyst. Cognos, Business Object's arch competitor, also markets a scorecard product, called Metrics Manager.

A company that has set improving customer satisfaction as a strategic goal can use the software to show the relationship between customer satisfaction and unresolved customer support cases and, in turn, determine the number of support staffers needed to address customer-support issues more quickly.

DataLan Corp., a provider of business intelligence and collaboration systems-integration services, has been testing the new software for about four months to help manage its sales operations. "We establish goals and ownership of those goals and use BusinessObjects Performance Manager to publish those back to the sales force," says president John Arnold. The new software also alerts managers when sales are outside defined thresholds, he says. DataLan uses other Business Objects software, including its data-integration technology, which provides data to the performance-management application.

BusinessObjects Performance Manager is a module within Business Objects' Application Foundation system. The software will be available in July. Pricing hasn't been set.