Web Exclusive

October 1, 2003

Ventana Research Product Assessment Guide for Performance Management

More than 60 products scored for their ability to meet business requirements

by Mark Smith

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PerformanceCycle: Process Steps, Functionalities, and Capabilities Defined

In this section, each of the three steps in the PerformanceCycle is defined and is then followed by its Functional Requirements and Capabilities. This presentation of Process, Functional Requirement, and Functional Capability follows the format of the Assessment Guide.

PERFORMANCECYCLE PROCESS 1: UNDERSTAND

To comprehend the status of the business or processes through modeling, accessing, discovering, and interacting with information.

Model

Define: Define logical business models, dimensions, hierarchies, levels, attributes, and numeric and text metrics. It also includes the ability to handle time-series-related structures, information security, foreign languages, and logical model management.

Manipulate: Modify logical business models by grouping business model levels and creating custom hierarchies. It also requires the ability to support aliases and user-based naming of members of the business model.

Business Rules: Define business rules at the metric and member level and as a mathematical formula.

Manage: Manage the model within the product or RDBMS. It also includes the ability to audit, deploy, and synchronize models for use throughout an organization.

Access

Source: Access data from a RDBMS, multidimensional database management systems (MDBMS), and XML. It also includes the capability to access data from any ERP or CRM application suite at the application level.

Integrate: Integrate information from RDBMSs via SQL or XML into a document, report, table, and/or chart.

Access: Define users or groups and customize the view of the portal or access mechanism to information. It also includes the capability to access documents directly from a portal, Microsoft Excel, URL, and wireless or mobile devices via text or voice. It also includes the capability to synchronize a document with a client computer or mobile device.

Manage: Save regular and external documents with attributes into a category catalog. It also includes the capability to refresh documents and save them in XML.

Discover

Query: Create and save queries and results as well as directly query physical tables and columns and metadata. It also includes the capability to do specific-level manipulation of queries through setting limits and attributes and through multi-step querying, and joining of results. In addition, it offers the ability to cache query results, perform aggregations, execute stored procedures and inner and outer joins, query text metrics, and audit queries.

Calculate: Calculate columns and custom and derived metrics, including subtotal, aggregate, what-if, and a whole set of calculation functions — mathematical, statistical, logical, financial, date, and numerical. It also includes the capability to automatically add subtotals and totals on Web and Windows clients.

Analyze: Build derived metrics from source and resulting metrics. It also includes the capability to build top/bottom, rank by count, value, and percentage, analyze time series, and perform analyses using scatter, bubble, and clustering methods.

Interact

Navigate: Drill down and drill across on information and detail that supports the metrics. It also includes the capability to interact in other methods that can support the Understand process.

Interact: Pivot, page, and sort in a report or table along with filter by members, metrics, and attributes. It also includes the capability to graphically select information and create a resulting document or presentation.

Present: Display information in a report, chart, map, table, financial report, and text form. It also includes the ability to format presentation elements, such as the border, cell, text, range of values, and so on.

Search: Search a repository for documents or contents in the document.

PERFORMANCECYCLE PROCESS 2: OPTIMIZE

To make performance as effective as possible through forecasting, collaboration, integration, and action taking.

Project

Forecast: Forecast from base data, percentage, numbers, rules, and user-defined values.

Plan: Modify the business model into scenarios, perform simulations to recalculate a model, and save the versions and business model scenarios, simulations, and plans.

Mine: Mine data based on decision trees, induction rules, statistical trees, neural nets, and other methods. It also includes the capability to output results sets into a RDBMS for use in other systems and export data-mining models to Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML).

Collaborate

Publish: Directly email documents to individuals or groups in the organization.

Share: Share documents among individuals and categories.

Interact: Make notations, annotations, and comments in newsgroups and embed video clips and documents.

Coordinate: Approve documents and define a workflow for document routing.

Integrate

Customize: Build customer user interfaces using scripting, custom controls, and use graphics to drive applications. It also includes the capability to build applications using an API or SDK and build value-added components on top of these interfaces.

Integrate: Integrate documents, query interfaces, document catalogs, external documents, and Web sites into a portal. It also includes the capability to integrate documents into CRM and ERP applications, application servers, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and NT LanMan (NTLM) interfaces.

Act

Update: Update RDBMSs with information from a document, report, table, metrics, and other sources.

Communicate: Embed text with metrics, members, and documents and create notes for reading comments or observations. It also includes the capability to send XML, wireless markup language (WML), HTML, and messages via Java messaging service (JMS).

Recommend: Make recommendations for what actions to take next, create summary documents for further analysis, and create and integrate recommendations from analytics to enterprise applications.

PERFORMANCECYCLE PROCESS 3: ALIGN

To adjust action through goal setting, scoring, notifying, and automating performance management.

Target

Vision and Mission: Define a vision, mission, and business strategy that are accessible by users in the organization.

Goal Setting: Define goals and align metrics to the users in an organization.

Objective Definition: Define objectives that are connected to goals and metrics.

Benchmark: Define benchmarks for setting goals at the user and group levels. It also includes the capability to import benchmark metrics for comparison.

Score

Dashboard: Display information that something is out of alignment using special indicators, including visualization, meter, gauge, trend, and underlying threshold.

Scorecard: Link information from goals and objectives to metrics, define and visualize organizational hierarchy, and implement and certify on Balanced Scorecard Collaborative methodology. It also includes the capability to define and display cause-and-effect diagrams, support cascading or hierarchical scorecards, and build graphical relationships between metrics and goals and objectives.

Custom Application: Build a custom application for scoring performance with business logic.

Inform

Define: Define documents in a WYSIWYG environment and format documents with graphics, colors, and cells using fonts, colors, alignment, borders, and patterns. It also includes the capability to build a report template, cascading style sheets, drag-and-drop dimensions, prompted reports, and master-detail reports.

Output: Output documents in PDF, XLS, HTML, and XML formats along with automatically refreshing data. It also includes the capability to output documents to printers using National Language Support and to support briefing books formats.

Deliver: Define documents to be automatically generated and delivered via bursting and run schedules for delivery via email, fax, voice, printer, and the Web. It also includes the capability to subscribe to document delivery.

Personalize: Personalize the user interface based on login, groups, rules, new information, and predictive technology.

Automate

Alert: Set a monitor or threshold for a metric based on variance and ranges. It also includes the capability to change information in a document based on a monitor or schedule an alert to run automatically.

Agents: Define an agent to take action based on another action through a workflow, with business logic, or directly take action. It also includes the capability to schedule agents to run on a custom schedule.

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