Intelligent Insight on PerformancePoint : Performance Management

Methodologies, Tools and Process, Process, Process

btamblyn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:16:00 GMT

Last week I was invited to Nimbus Partners Inspiring Performance conference at my beloved Emirates Stadium. As an Arsenal fan this made the whole conference even more impressive.

I've been working with Nimbus for just over 12 months now - and their CEO Ian Gotts has become both a close friend and mentor since we've been working together.

I've blogged about this before BUT I can't emphasise enough the importance of aligning a strong methodology that links strategy with business processes. The last decision to make should be which technology solution supports our organisational strategy.

What I REALLY like about Nimbus solution is that their product Control ES now integrates really tightly with MOSS and allows users to create an operational process dashboard that allows for a seamless interaction between the tightly controlled and defined processes and the tools information workers use on a day to day basis.

People that think really hard about the processual layer are significantly more likely to drive the successful deployment of performance management and analysts back this up.

These three components need to work in harmony - Ian and his team have proven this over a number of years and were actually presented with a "cool vendor" award from Gartner. I'm pretty sure this is a first for a Microsoft partner and without question a first for a business process vendor. Only joking.

Nimbus have developed a fantastic FTSE100 client base over the last five years including SAP, Toyota, Unilever and Chevron and I would encourage anyone looking to implement CPM to also look closely at the importance of this as part of your preparation for investing in CPM.

Oh and if your a Microsoft CPM partner - I would really encourage you to look closely at how you could work with these guys. Some partners in the UK have made the strategic decision to do so and it is really bearing fruit.

Technorati Tags: Business Process Management, Ian Gotts, Nimbus Partners, Performance Management, PerformancePoint Server, Gartner

Business Intelligence 2.0 re-visited

btamblyn — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:16:00 GMT

Anyone - who's a regular reader of this blog (I think there's about 3 other than my immediate family) will know that I have a real fascination of the role web 2.0 will have in transforming the business intelligence landscape. Over the past couple of weeks there's been some really interesting announcements.

In late March it was announced that Sharp Analytics had been acquired by digital marketing agency iCrossing. Undoubtedly an interesting and bold move. Tom Huddock interviewed CEO Chuck Sharp which you can find here. What's really interesting about this is that Chuck sees himself as a marketer first and a technologist second, and I kind of like this philosophy. Often we get bogged-down in the technology and often the business benefits were looking to deliver are lost.

Tom also pointed me to another Microsoft partner 90 degree software who have a new reporting solution that was designed using Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates really nicely into the Microsoft Dynamics stack. I've attached a link to Tom's discussion with Michael Matrick - Co-founder and President. These guys will actually be exhibiting at BI Conference in Seattle - so if you get the chance I'd encourage you to go and have a look at some of the cool stuff they're doing on our platform.

Incidentally - if you're not regular readers of Tom's blog - I'd encourage you to check it out.

Finally I wanted to draw your attention to the guys at Proto.

Proto is a Windows based mashup application designed to join your desktop apps with the web. You need the Windows application to both create and use the mashups. It’s component based, joining your desktop and web apps by pulling data from your desktop applications, such as Outlook, and feeding it into online web components, such as Yahoo! maps. Guys if you're reading this - I'd love to see the mashup recreated using Microsoft virtual earth . Proto has the Visual Basic for Applications development environment (VBA IDE) and Adobe Flash baked in, so you can create your own modules to pull and display data from your applications.

Extremely cool.

So what of Microsoft BI and a foray into the world of Web 2.0 - it's a question I get asked a lot. I think priority 1 for us at the moment is getting the rich-client performance management solution in market - but there's huge amounts of work going on within our Live Services group at the moment which we'll hopefully be taping into in the not too distant future. We're discouraged from hypothesizing any more than this but it's certainly something I'd love to see.

Technorati Tags: PerformancePoint Server, Performance Management, Web 2.0, Sharp Anaytics, Proto, 90 degree Software, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft

De-constructing the "Angry Cinnamon"

btamblyn — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:43:00 GMT

So why the angry cinnamon - A good question: READ I have absolutely NO idea. A term used internally and although I don't know it's exact origin - I'm crediting Chuck Mitten who works in the Microsoft OBA Partner team in Boise.

So let's break this down.

BI has historically been a ‘read-only’ business. The IT department delivers a great, clean, trusted data layer. The users grab that data in rich tools like Excel and they develop insights. But what happens after that? Unless you translate your insights into a plan, and record that plan somewhere, we’ll never know if your insights, and your actions, made a real difference to the business.

So let’s say I am retail analyst and I'm doing some store analysis. I need to interact with and use complete data, sales and expenses which is delivered from the operational data store, I use corporate data, fully burdened by allocated costs, and I decide that we need to move two inside sales reps out to the sales floor.

In PerformancePoint, we record that decision. You’ve effectively changed your resource allocation. You are now accountable for that decision. Next month, or maybe next quarter, we can compare your forecast with the new resource allocation to actual data and we’ll all know if that was a good decision or not. And one of the great things about accountability is, the flip-side of that coin is auditability. In PerformancePoint, we know who saw what data, because we log that, who made what decision, because we made BI read-write and of course, we know the result.

The other nice feature of PerformancePoint Server is that because we’re at this higher level of the stack, we can give each user the right amount of data to make a decision; not too little AND more importantly not too much. Generally we use Excel. So, when the sales forecast is due, we send the sales rep a link to a spreadsheet. In fact, it’s a link to the PerformancePoint server. When the user hits that link, we generate a spreadsheet that has the right amount of data for that user, the correct, current data. They add their inputs to the forecast, submit it and we move it along to the next person in the business flow, usually the manager. The user never had to hunt for data, never saw too much data or the wrong data. We record what they did, when they did it. And the whole time, the user was just ‘using Excel’ something they already know how to do. This is good for users of course, but it’s good for IT departments too. Because, deep down, we’ve taken this formerly document oriented, hard to control, hard to manage process and made it a centrally managed, controlled, database process. But the users just keep using Excel…

OK, so when we talk about Microsoft business intelligence and performance management we look at it from three perspectives:

SQL Server as the technical BI platform
Office as the user platform and;
PerformancePoint as the business platform

And we use these platforms to help us answer the questions below:

Starting from the top right hand corner the first two are really about monitoring your business . The third is analysis, plain and simple. The last two are really about planning. And it’s a cycle. You see something happening, you delve into it and you make a plan to address it. Or you have a plan, you watch for actual results. If they are anomalous, you do some analysis. In Performance Management we support the whole Monitor, Analyze, Plan cycle. Today we have two products in the market at this tier of the stack. Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is our tool for monitoring your business. It, working with SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services, answers those first two questions; What happened? And what is happening? ProClarity 6.2 is a tool that adds value to Analysis Services and address the third question; Why?

In the summer of 2007 we’ll merge these two tools, actually the next versions of these tools with a new planning component to form PerformancePoint Server 2007. We’ve been working on the planning component for a while. It’s important because not only does it address the last two questions, but it also adds the corporate aspect of trusting your decisions, and the accountability.

By corporate, we mean two things. First, decisions should be made using data that reflects corporate reality. Going back to my sales analysis from earlier, using data at the store level might lead to one set of decisions. But when I factor in corporate effects, like regional and national costs, I might make a very different set of decisions. So PerformancePoint includes an engine that does consolidation, allocation and inter-company eliminations. The second part of this is making decisions in the context of the corporate process. So if I want to budget more advertising dollars in my region, that plan needs to be approved by my boss. Or my sales forecast has to go to my district manager before it gets locked down. PerformancePoint includes the functionality for implementing your company’s business process in the decision making flow.

Anyway, that’s the stack.

So when I begin to deconstruct the stack and look at partner services the opportunities are plentiful. What's really interesting is the services at the top of the stack in the Performance Management layer. For example services such as metrics development involve highly strategic engagements requiring close interaction at board level to ensure firstly that you're helping your customer to measure the right things and also help them to drive business alignment down and across the organisation. Gaining pervasive adoption therefore emphasise's the need to drive a structured business change programme. Because of the highly strategic nature of these activities - they represent a premium level service, and you're therefore able to charge accordingly. We can assist by reducing the cost of software acquisition and utilising existing technology assets.

If we look at the concept of business process consulting we can begin to draw some similar conclusions. Business methodologies such as balanced scorecarding, activity based costing and six sigma are extremely useful in providing a framework for Performance Management however in isolation they are just that - FRAMEWORKS. A methodology without a performance management process will undoubtedly end in failure. Equally a performance management process that needs to integrate disparate planning & budgeting, forecasting, and management reporting applications will ultimately lead to extra time and cost that needs to be absorbed by either the partner or passed on to the customer potentially putting the performance management programme and your services revenue at risk.

So that's it. As always I'm looking for feedback - so feel free to leave a comment at the end of this blog post and I'll be sure to respond.

Technorati Tags: PerformancePoint Server, Performance Management, ProClarity, Business Scorecard Manager, Partner, Microsoft, Business Intelligence

My name is...

btamblyn — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:49:12 GMT

Ben Tamblyn

I was at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner Day on Wednesday and met some great partners who are beginning to look seriously at the Microsoft performance management platform as a viable and cost effective alternative for their customers. There was some amazing feedback on the solution offering given that the planning, budgeting, and forecasting components of the PerformancePoint solution is still in BETA.

Equally as interesting was the fact that some of the guys in attendance are also regular readers of my blog. Jim Plant asked me during one of the breaks why my name was not published anywhere on my blog which surprised me a little - so I went back to check and sure enough Jim was correct.

It was quite timely as it happens, because there's been a lot of talk internally about providing contact information (should I/shouldn't I) including email addresses and telephone numbers on blogs.

So here's my take on why its just a GOOD IDEA.

Blogging provides a human face to an organisation like Microsoft and allows us to connect with an audience that it's just not possible to meet with one-to-one.
We each have a responsibility to change the perceptions many people have of Microsoft, and making ourselves inaccessible confirms the misconception that we are arrogant, aloof and misguided - none of which I believe is truly representative of the large majority of people working at Microsoft.

Incidentally my contact information can now be found in the "About" section of this blog. Jim - my apologies for the oversight.

PerformancePoint Server Pricing

btamblyn — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:07:44 GMT

I've been wanting to publish this post since returning from the OBA bootcamp in Redmond two weeks ago. At the BI Gartner summit in London yesterday we finally announced the pricing for PerformancePoint Server.

I think it emphasises our commitment to providing pervasive business intelligence and performance management. It will be licensed much the same as other Office products with a single server + single client access license (CAL). The price will be $20,000 per server and $195 per CAL. Internally we breakdown the product components into three areas and even have a three letter acronym (MAP).

Monitoring (M) which includes scorecarding and dashboards which are typically delivered today through Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) and ProClarity dashboard.
Analytics (A) which will provide for both a lite-analytics designed specifically for the business user and a more robust analytics designed with business analysts in mind which will look to integrate ProClarity's analytics server (PAS) neatly into the wider Microsoft Office stack.
Planning (P) which will provide planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting. Previously code-named Biz# this will deliver our vision of creating a more ubiquitous and pervasive tool that moves planning beyond the financial planning department and into the business by utilising Excel as the front-end to the planning process.

The server and CAL offering will provide all (Monitoring; Analytics; Planning) functionality so customers will basically receive a full performance suite for a fraction of the price of today's offerings.

When this was announced internally two weeks ago the first question posed by the MS field about what impact this may have on our competitors and the existing market consolidation we're seeing today. A difficult question to answer although I can assure you our pricing strategy is designed to ruffle a few feathers and force the market to begin to look at developing a pervasive strategy for business intelligence and performance management. Whether or not this is a real "game-changer" will depend upon the perception of the depth of functionality PerformancePoint will provide. From what I've seen so far and given the fact that it's a version 1.0 product I think you'll be pretty impressed. To keep up to speed I'd encourage everyone to sign-up to the CTP if you haven't already.

Technorati tags: Performance Management, PerformancePoint Server, ProClarity, Pricing, Gartner, Business Intelligence

Standardisation is Important, Microsoft is not

btamblyn — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:21:33 GMT

This was an interesting post from Craig Schiff last week on b-eye. Craig is the former OutlookSoft CEO, and a BPM pioneer who now works for BPM Partners an independent professional services firm. Craig presented the results of the recent BPM Pulse Survey (here's a link to the webcast recording).

There's some really interesting content in here but unsurprisingly the thing that really caught my eye was this. Craig's summarised it really nicely in three points.

More than two thirds of the respondents are pursuing business performance management as part of their corporate system consolidation/standardization initiatives.
A similar number were not aware of Microsoft's momentous announcement last June about their planned entry into the space.
Of those who were aware of the announcement, the majority said it had little to no impact on their BPM plans.

Now before you think this is just another post from a Microsoft guy defending his turf you're wrong. I'm surprised on one hand that there's a lack of awareness out there about us entering this space but as we approach launch as with all new MS product launches this will no doubt intensify. On the other hand whilst full-scale marketing/PR saturation is great for Vista and even Office when you're trying to emphasise that you're a serious player in this market establishing credibility is not always achieved through fanfare and banner waving and this brings me nicely on to my next point.

The majority of respondents suggest that the announcement will have little or no impact upon their BPM plans - and why should it, WE HAVE TO EARN THE RIGHT TO BE CONSIDERED cause we're the new kids on the block.

That said I think we've got a more than credible offering that will allow us to:

deliver an economic advantage to our customers across Microsoft's entire business intelligence and performance management stack
tell a really compelling integration story from the desktop to the database
provide a platform (as opposed to a suite) that is designed to work together and leveraging (good-or-bad) the most pervasive tool for data analysis available today - Excel

There's a wealth of useful information @ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX101680481033.aspx and it's my job to assist in helping us earn the right to be considered and for the NKOTB I still think we have a pretty good story to tell.

Technorati tags: BPM, Craig Schiff, PerformancePoint, Excel, b-eye, Competitors, Office 2007

Vendor consolidation continues: Cognos acquires Celequest

btamblyn — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:52:00 GMT

An interesting acquisition and evidence again of the vendor convergence going on. I've been watching Celequest for a while primarily because they've got a really interesting SaaS offering which it seems maybe one of the key drivers around this acquisition for Cognos.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Performance Management, Cognos, Celequest, SaaS, BPM, Competitors