CPM = Process + BI

The consolidation of business intelligence and corporate performance management domains continue to evolve, as CPM is recognised as the sum of BI + Process.

End-to-end solutions that can better link operational, financial and analytical data to strategic business objectives are driving convergence of both process and technology in the BI and performance management arenas.

CPM is traditionally under the management of the finance organization, used largely for financial planning and consolidation purposes, whilst BI activities are managed by the BI competency center.

As BI and CPM get more integrated, this management distinction is becoming blurred as BI and performance management practices support the same business processes across three key business areas: executive, finance and operations.

Executives – are generally only be concerned with visibility into business performance relative to financial and strategic plans. However, using a common BI framework, they can review the overall health of the business using financial KPI, then dive into operational KPI to gain more insight into performance of specific areas contributing to the KPI. This hierarchical presentation format, using dynamic dashboards and scorecards, ensures that operational data is not initially presented outside of business context, but is available as a linked drill down if required.

Both planning and financial consolidation processes require BI to enable dynamic analysis of the cause-and-effect relationships driving business performance.

BI in the Operations domain has largely been focused on detailed analysis of sales, manufacturing and supply chain data to drive operational planning and cost and revenue management.

In response to this business need convergence technology vendors are working at close integration of CPM, BPM and BI product suites to align to this need.

Executives, managers and analysts alike will require a common interface to build strategic objectives and measures, develop financial plans and report on current and future performance in an effort to minimize cycle times and adapt to change faster than the competition.

For example, IBM's TM1 financial performance management application has been integrated with the Cognos BI and Planning Suite of applications. Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus provides a common user experience for all of its BI applications through integration points with their Enterprise Performance Management Suite.

Hence, core technologies are merging to ease transition between BI and performance management environments. Program and project managers involved in initiatives in any one of these three areas must be cognisant of this holistic view of business performance, to ensure the value of their current efforts is realized well into the future.

This leads to a plethora of questions that executives must answer regarding how BI and performance management competencies will be organized and managed within their organization. The current approach is for BI to be managed by the BI competency center. As a change management tool, I strongly support the view that until BI has been sufficiently deployed throughout the organization, and until traditional financial performance cultures have been updated to more appropriate perspectives for today’s organizations, BI should remain organized and managed by a BICC separate from Finance. Once BI critical mass has been achieved, alignment of the CPM and BI functions, either back into Finance or as a conjoint BI/CPM competency center is consistent with the alignment of the three performance methodologies. This ensures governance, procedures and technology best practices across the two disciplines.