The BPM DrumbeatWill business performance management live up to all the promises?by Seth Grimes Continued from Page 1 Software to the Rescue?Three stripes of software vendors would have you believe that they provide just-as-good alternatives to custom development and expensive consultants, namely those selling BI, operational, and process-modeling systems. On the BI front, leading vendors are offering performance-management solutions integrated with independent analytic engines in the form of packaged analytic applications. Hyperion Solutions Corp., traditionally a financials and planning vendor, was perhaps the first company to take the plunge when it merged with Essbase-OLAP provider Arbor Software in 1998. In the last year, other vendors have made similar moves: Cognos Inc. acquired Adaytum, and SAS acquired ABC (Activity Based Costing) Technologies Inc. Other BI vendors, notably Brio Software Inc. and Business Objects SA, are focusing more on toolkits that facilitate creating indicators (derived values intended to reveal key performance factors) and dashboard displays suitable for everyone from the company's CGO (Chief Golfing Officer) to production managers. Data and operational-system integration is the key problem for BI vendors. BI tools by themselves provide only enabling technology. Talk all you want about closed-loop decision support: A dashboard display alone isn't capable of managing anything. There's no real management in BI vendors' BPM. To varying degrees, BI vendors have an additional, more profound problem: limited analytic capabilities. For instance, if you were to rely on the forecasting possibilities in BI-market-leading Microsoft Analysis Services, which provides only linear regression (fitting a line to data points), you'd make no allowance for production, inventory, and staffing needs that arise due to seasonal factors such as the year-end holiday season. The only vendor exception is SAS, whose platform is extremely statistically rich. But its ability to deliver may be limited by a very cautious corporate culture and a plethora of initiatives. These initiatives range from promoting a major new release, SAS 9, with the company's first multithreaded engine to supporting an alphabet soup of APIs. SAS hopes to erase perceptions that it has a closed platform while at the same time offering vertical, industry-specific applications and operational systems. Such contradictory messages may prove to be a hard sell. Next, take operational-system vendor PeopleSoft, which in recent years, like other enterprise application providers, has been adding analytic capabilities to its portfolio. PeopleSoft offers an Enterprise Scorecard with Activity Based Management that presents a process-centric view. According to PeopleSoft, its Enterprise Warehouse provides "prepackaged analytic content" and a "predefined data mart" and added value through "predefining processes." PeopleSoft states that its "solution also includes more than 1,200 predefined business metrics that are delivered in portals, applications, or OLAP tools." My reading: "PeopleSoft knows best." We should update Henry Ford's famous line about the Model T. Instead of "you can have any color you want so long as it's black," read "you can do any analysis you want so long as it's PeopleSoft predefined" and, implicitly, encompassed within a homogeneous, PeopleSoft-centered operating environment. A third class of vendors has started with process-oriented, application-independent approach. OutlookSoft Corp.'s tools deserve a closer look, which I haven't taken to date because of its reliance on the analytically shallow Microsoft platform. That reliance is shared to a lesser degree by SeeRun Corp., which provides, in addition to OLAP dimensional data warehouse integration, behavioral analytics that track "multistream sequences of events" via a scenario engine and a state model. SeeRun's TrueTime module layers a rules system on the behavioral- and dimensional-analysis components. And its process-modeling and data-integration facilities provide a framework for linking the disparate operational and analytic systems found in heterogeneous computing environments. Nonetheless, SeeRun and similar startup vendors aren't sufficiently established to meet mainstream needs. Realistic ExpectationsThe BPM picture isn't bleak by any means. There's significant value in the performance management offerings provided by BI, enterprise-application, and other vendors. Yet BPM evangelism glosses over many hurdles, such as bringing complex methodologies to the masses, implementing the methodologies in mainstream software, integrating data, providing the required analytic, process-modeling, and simulation capabilities, and so on. I foresee steady BPM adoption with ever-broadening scope of measured performance, deeper analytics, and more illuminating interfaces. But it'll be a long time before BPM will deliver on the promises of managing performance, of supporting nontraditional performance factors, and of operating on anything close to an enterprise scale. Keep watching BPM, but don't abandon a skeptical perspective. Seth Grimes [grimes@altaplana.com] is a principal of Alta Plana Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy specializing in analytic computing systems and demographic and economic statistics. RESOURCESBalanced Scorecard Collaborative: www.bscol.com Brio Software Inc.: www.brio.com Business Objects SA: www.businessobjects.com Cognos Inc.: www.cognos.com Hyperion Solutions Corp.: www.hyperion.com IntelligentBPM: www.intelligentbpm.com OutlookSoft Corp.: www.outlooksoft.com PeopleSoft: www.peoplesoft.com SAS: www.sas.com SeeRun Corp.: www.seerun.com Six Sigma: www.isixsigma.com
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