Time For A Wide-Angle ViewTime For A Wide-Angle View

Vendors such as Cognos Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. offer distinct business-performance management products. Cognos offers a complete approach to performance management through its newly acquired planning application, Adaytum. The company has combined the planning capabilities from Adaytum with the existing monitoring and analytical capabilities of its Series 7 business-intelligence platform.

That lets Cognos provide what it calls corporate-performance management. These capabilities drive performance by communicating a common purpose throughout the organization, provide an enterprise scorecard to monitor the performance of the plan, and provide enterprise business intelligence to report and analyze issues.

With its Business Performance Management Suite, which includes applications for planning and forecasting, as well as strong analytical tools, Hyperion offers what it calls continued performance visibility. Hyperion's software delivers collaborative business planning and modeling, measures performance, and analyzes results. These functions, combined with the use of an embedded integration server from Vignette Corp., create a framework for business-performance management.

Business-intelligence applications already are maturing into business-performance management applications. Currently, however, business-performance management is more like "business plan" management than true performance management. In order to manage performance, activities must be designed, conducted, and governed from start to finish.

While business-intelligence and business-performance management software can be used to support decisions, current business-performance management apps don't provide the control necessary to see that all required process changes take effect. Still, Doculabs believes that companies must plan to integrate business-performance management with business-process management.

The first generation of business-process management solutions will integrate with business-intelligence software for tracking and tweaking business process, but advanced implementations will do much more. For example, future implementations of business-performance management and business-process management applications will be able to spawn a business process based on analyzed metrics.

Also, future business-performance management apps will be designed to change the route of a workflow based on a calculation. In that way, the rules engine from the business-process management system will respond to the results of a calculation in the business-performance management system or the change in performance-tracking priority.

The key to success won't change, however. Companies considering these technologies will be able to view business-performance management and business-process management as two very important links in the same chain.

Brook Foust is an analyst, Gaurav Verma is a senior analyst, and Bob Anders is a technical editor with Doculabs, a research and consulting firm that helps organizations plan for, select, and optimize technology for their business strategies. Contact them at 312-433-7793, [email protected], or www.doculabs.com.

Illustration by James Kaczman