BI & BPM: More Important than ERP ? (Podcast)

Business performance management (BPM) has gone, in just five short years, from a silo of data in the office of finance to an enterprise-wide application that has proven to have a fundamental impact on the overall performance of an organization. As we watch its widespread adoption and the importance it quickly takes on for end users, along with the strong return on investment (ROI), BPM combined with existing BI (business intelligence) initiatives can be every bit as critical as transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Read the full story (B-Eye Network)

Microsoft Shines a BPM Light on The Small Ones

Emboldened by mass adoption for its BizTalk Server 2006 middleware by Fortune 500 businesses, Microsoft said it has formed the Business Process Alliance (BPA) to make it easier for smaller businesses to employ business process management (BPM) software.

BPA is a group of 10 companies whose goal is to build BPM packages for smaller companies that haven’t yet jumped onto the bandwagon.

Read the full story (internet.com)

BPM and SOA insight from Mathias Kirchmer

On the heels of the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in Amelia Island, Fla., SearchSAP.com sat down with Mathias Kirchmer, chief innovation and marketing officer for Saarbrücken, Germany-based IDS Scheer to discuss the business process management (BPM) topics that came out of the conference. Kirchmer dissects some trends he’s seeing in the BPM market, gives an update on the company’s partnerships with SAP and Oracle and offers some advice for BPM projects.

Read the full story (SearchSAP)

Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Coming into Focus

Microsoft Corp.’s PerformancePoint Server 2007 offering might still be incubating, but it’s not as if the software giant ever shied away from trumpeting soon-and-inevitably-to-be-hatched-products in the past.

And with last week’s release of a new PerformancePoint Community Technology Preview (CTP), Microsoft has at least a plausible reason to crow.

PerformancePoint, Redmond’s long-awaited performance management (PM) entry, could do for PM what SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) did for OLAP and reporting, respectively: take it mainstream. Last week, Microsoft officials outlined PerformancePoint licensing and pricing information, discussed the fate of the former ProClarity Corp.’s assets (a number of which have been incorporated into PerformancePoint), talked up the mainstreaming of PM in general, and seemed confident that Microsoft will deliver its inaugural PM suite on time—in the second half of 2007.

Read the full story (TDWI)

Who needs BPM: CFOs unconvinced

For all the talk and vendor marketing pieces pushing business performance management (BPM), with its promise of integrated data and dashboards, powerful analytics and ability to connect financial and planning applications, there are still a lot of CFOs and chief information officers (CIOs) who apparently need convincing.

Tom Manley, senior vice president and CFO of Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN) , one of the BPM software market leaders, told an investor conference recently that “market opportunity” penetration appears to be no more than 20 to 25 percent. Cognos itself claims that 80 percent of the Fortune 1,000 use its products, and archrival Hyperion Solutions (Nasdaq: HYSL) can claim similar numbers. However, despite solid growth in the market, there hasn’t been a “tipping point” that has turned mass prospects further down the food chain into mass converts.

Read the full story (TechNewsWorld)

SOA moves toward event handling

BEM is a way to get machines to alert people when a business process is going wrong and needs human attention to get back on track.

 ”Business event management is the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution based on the business context of the events,” according to Forrester’s definition.

Read the full story (TechTarget)

Understanding Performance and Collaborative Workspaces

A new term has appeared on the analyst and consultant radar screens and magic quadrants. This term has a few variations – information workplace (Forrester), high performance workplace (Gartner), performance workspace (Accenture) – but the focus is the same, i.e., to provide an integrated information management environment that improves employee performance and productivity. In my presentations, I use performance workspace, and this is the term I will use throughout this article.

I like the approach used by Accenture to describe the role of a performance workspace. Accenture talks about the “nine performance accelerators,” which are learning, performance management, business intelligence, process support, search and data relationships, access to applications, knowledge, access to experts, and collaboration. Whereas these nine accelerators clearly define the integrated information business users need to do their jobs, they raise questions about the relationship of performance workspaces to technologies such as business portals, knowledge management, and even business intelligence and performance management. Let’s examine these relationships in more detail beginning with the business portal.

Read the full story (B-Eye Network)

It’s All About the Performance Management (Tools)

If new research from Gartner Inc. is any indication, 2006 was a heady year for most performance management (PM) players.

Gartner’s last market sizing (in 2003) pegged the overall PM market at $520 million—and growing. And while Gartner’s latest research doesn’t update that figure, it does present a clearer picture of just who the major PM players are. It also shows just how much the overall PM market has matured over the last three years. More importantly, it depicts a surging PM marketplace in which major players are thriving.

Read the full story (Enterprise Systems Journal)

Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management: A Marriage Made in Heaven?

In the past few years, two major technologies – business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) – have grown closer and closer together. In fact, some people think they are now one and the same, which they are not.  They are, however, very intertwined and share a synergistic relationship. Business intelligence provides tools essential to the delivery of business performance management applications. BPM, in turn, helps drive adoption of business intelligence by tying it to a strategic business initiative. Like most relationships, this one is not in balance. While BPM requires business intelligence to achieve its goals, the reverse is not true. To put it another way, BI can address the requirements of many business applications and does not truly need BPM to be successful. BPM, on the other hand, could not exist without taking advantage of BI capabilities. BPM is business intelligence with domain expertise added (and quite a bit of application code).

Read the full story (B-Eye Network)

Microsoft BI Emerges

Microsoft has made available a preview version of its forthcoming PerformancePoint Server 2007. Due to ship next summer, the tool is designed to open up access to business intelligence (BI) functions for a wider cross-section of the enterprise workforce.

The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of PerformancePoint Server 2007 combines planning, budgeting, fore- casting and financial consolidation capabilities. A second preview version, due early in 2007, will incorporate analytics and visualisation functions from ProClarity, a BI developer Microsoft acquired earlier this year.

Read the full story (ITWeek UK)