Videoblog on strategy, organizational behavior and performance management

Frank Buytendijk writes a nice blog on performance management at Oracle's corporate blog. I enjoy reading his posts, he knows deeply about the subject and writes clearly and concisely. Recently, he started a videoblog on strategy, organizational behavior and performance management. At the moment, he already published 4 videos: Best Practices, Return on IT, Book Review 1 and Dealing with Dilemmas.

That is a good initiative by Frank. Watch and enjoy!

Below is the first videoblog: Best Practices



Frank Buytendijk wrote a very good book called Performance Leadership. He is writing a new book entitled Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short (The book is on pre-order at Amazon.com. He commented about the book in the videoblog Dealing with Dilemmas).

Business Transformation

Oracle published this month their Journal of Management Excellence, with the title Business Transformation. "Slowly but surely we are expanding the scope of the Journal of Management Excellence. In this issue, we discuss “business transformation”. Business transformation has many different facets, and we discuss a number of them", Frank Buytendijk said, in the Letter from the Editor. Frank also introduced the new editor Toby Hatch, who will drive the next phase of maturity for the Journal of Management Excellence.

As always, this issue has several good articles:
- Business Innovation: The CIO Perspective - Thomas Oestreich
- Re-Learning the ROPES - Kevin Narain
- Transforming Your Risk and Performance Management - Brian Gregory
- Transforming the Business for Success - Kathy Horton
- Can Value Chain Analysis lead to Business Transformation? - William Stratton
- Transforming Business Success Through the Implementation of A Performance Architecture - Jim Gurowka
- IT Complexity and Business Transformation: Turning Ideas Into Innovation - Sandeep Banerjie
- Industry Insights - Mark Conway

About the articles, Frank said: "It seems to me, looking at all the articles, that business transformation itself has transformed over the years. Gone are the days of reengineering the complete business in a big bang project style. Business transformation today is a series of smaller steps, gradually and in a controlled way leading to a new desired state. Most transformation is driven by the external world, by political, economical, social, technological, environmental and legal change. These external forces change, and it is not always possible to drive them yourself. Agility is the key to successful business transformation. The goal may be clear, the grand vision may still stand, but the way is continuously reevaluated."

You can access the previous issues of the Journal of Management Excellence in the Oracle site.

Journal of Management Excellence Issue 6: Building Trust

Frank Buytendijk announced in his Oracle's blog that the Journal of Management Excellence Issue 6 is out, with the title Building Trust.

In the Letter from the Editor, Frank wrote: "You could reason that the current economic crisis was actually caused by performance management. I realize that this is a provocative statement - but think about it. Many commentators highlighted the fact that bankers were given large bonuses based on the revenue they brought in by taking big risks. Linking incentives to targets is a performance management ‘best practice’. These same commentators pointed out that financial institutions often didn’t really understand the risk profile of the subprime mortgage packages that they bought, reshuffled into different packages, and sold. The risk calculations were based on very complex and advanced analytics; which are also part of performance management. Lastly, many organizations felt safe because they were ‘compliant with regulations’ and did all the necessary reporting. Obviously, ‘accountability’ (a large driver of performance management) was not enough. Hence, my harsh statement that performance management caused the current crisis.

So what’s the good news? I think performance management will play a leading role in weathering and solving the crisis too. The economy, despite all the mathematics, in the end is a social science and is influenced by human behavior. What was damaged the most in the beginning of the recession was ‘trust’. Financial institutions trusted the mathematical models too much. When the economy collapsed, the banks didn’t trust each other anymore. This impacted consumer confidence and trust, and the financial crisis impacted the real economy.

Rebuilding trust is the key to ending the recession. Consumers must regain trust to buy houses and cars again, which will fuel the real economy and restore the financial system. The path to trust is transparency; which is exactly what organizations should invest in."

This issue has many interesting articles:
- Trust, Relationships and Performance by Frank Buytendijk, Oracle Vice President and Fellow, Enterprise Performance Management.
- High-trust Companies Equal High-profit Companies by Claire Carradice, Service Excellence Operations Analyst Siemens IT Solutions and Services
- Enhancing Partnership Trust with Collaborative Performance Scorecarding by Mike Haley, President, Landmark Decisions and Toby Hatch, Oracle Senior Strategist
- Sustainability Results That Build Trust and Improve the Bottom Line by Angela Enyeart, Oracle Director, Sustainability Intelligence Product Strategy
- Transitioning to IFRS: What’s Your Roadmap? by John O’Rourke, Oracle Vice President BI and EPM Product Marketing
- Building Trust With an End-to-End Approach to Financial Reporting and Compliance by Mike Malwitz, Oracle Director, Product Strategy
- Managing Reputation Risk by Thomas Oestreich, Oracle Chief EPM Strategist
- Industry Insights by Mark Conway, Oracle Director, BI Product Marketing

The Journal of Management Excellence is a very good reference on Performance Management, provided by Oracle. The previous issues also can be downloaded.

Journal of Management Excellence #4 is out

Frank Buytendijk commented in his Oracle's blog that the new issue of Journal of Management Excellence is out. The title is Creating Value.

Frank said: "Creating value is the most important objective of every organization, but it is also the hardest to define. Creating shareholder value is perhaps the most tangible way of looking at value creation. We can look at the market capitalization, net present value of expected dividend streams, and the share price. Maybe the fact that it is relatively easy to measure and calculate shareholder value has been an important reason behind the popularity of the concept. But because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean that it is the right measure of success."

There are several interesting texts and commentaries in this issue:
- Connect Enterprise Performance Management Processes to Drive Business Value - Ivo Bauermann, Senior Director, Business Development, EPM
- Commentary: If You Are Ready, Now Is the Time! - John Kopcke, Senior Vice President, EPM
- The Need for Profitability Management - VJ Lal,Director, Product Strategy, EPM
- Commentary: The Complete Value of an Enterprise Performance Management System -Thomas Oestreich, Chief EPM Strategist
- Centraal Boekhuis: Creating Value by Delivering Business Intelligence as a Service - Emiel van Bockel, Manager Information Services, Centraal Boekhuis
- Guest Commentary: The Overinstrumented Enterprise - James Taylor, CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions and co-author of Smart (Enough) Systems
- True Value Index: A Measure for Sustainable Business Success - Frank Buytendijk, Vice President and Fellow, EPM
- Industry Insights - Mark Conway, Director, EPM Alliances and Research

The Journal of Management Excellence is a nice initiative from Oracle, where they are publishing very good materials about Business Intelligence and Performance Management.

CPM: Achieving value by effectively anticipating and managing change

I read a very good text called Corporate Performance Management: Achieving value by effectively anticipating and managing change, published by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and written by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle professionals.

They divided the text in three topics: The heart of the matter, An in–depth discussion and What this means for your business. Below is the summary of the text:

1- The heart of the matter
They started with a question: How does Corporate Performance Management (CPM) give you the right mix of standardization and flexibility to deliver predictable results and sustainable execution of your strategy?

Management systems today do a good job of budgeting, financial and management reporting, and rudimentary business intelligence analysis, but these information and process islands are usually disconnected from real-world decisions and corporate actions.

The promise of CPM is to bring together these processes and technologies into an integrated system and unified way of managing your business that is more powerful than its individual parts. A true “management system” integrates all areas of the business from a common strategy and vision, through a common business language, and establishes a culture of accountability and results.

2- An in-depth discussion
Executing your strategy is the challenge of every executive and manager in every organization; in fact, it’s everyone’s job. Add to that the challenge of day-to-day performance pressures from:
- Globalization and demographic change
- Technology advancements
- Environmental and sustainability requirements
- Disintermediation, social networks, and customer intelligence
- Commoditization and competition

Why it matters
What does this means for your business? Managing your business depends on the processes and technology being aligned to deliver the right mix of standardization and flexibility so you can:
- Believe in the numbers and report with confidence
- Set accurate expectations and anticipate results
- Deliver the right visibility to the right people at the right time, and hold them accountable for results
- Spend less time on non-value-add activities, so you can focus on what matters
- Execute with confidence and stand up to scrutiny

CPM is the glue that brings it all together
You should approach CPM with an enterprise-wide view, including finance, operations, HR, IT, sales and marketing, both functionally and at the operating level, touching all levels of the organization:
- It connects strategy, through planning, to sustained execution
- It connects people, process, technology, and data
- It’s built on connected process components including budgeting, planning & forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting & analysis, business intelligence, modeling, scorecarding, and master data management
- It’s connected with adjacencies such as GRC (governance, risk & compliance), including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, close and consolidation, revenue growth, M & A services, cost management, operations, and many other business initiatives
- It supports the management processes of aligning strategy to plans and resource allocations, evaluating performance and understanding what actions to take, and sustaining execution including rewarding stakeholders appropriately.

How technology leads to a viable CPM strategy
CPM directly enables the five capabilities of the agile enterprise:
1. Anticipating the future and planning for business opportunities
2. Simplifying and integrating business activities so they can be analyzed for cost and value
3. Focusing on innovation within the existing boundaries of your businesses
4. Integrating new business capabilities continuously, rapidly, and cost effectively
5. Managing change through people

How to build an agile foundation for change
Agility is your new core competency. Being able to anticipate change and quickly react to it should be built-in to your company management operating system.

3- What this means for your business
Before you decide which application or applications are right for you, consider these elements:

Strategic
- Make sure you have a long-term CPM vision into which your current and short-term portfolio of finance, IT, and operational initiatives fit
- Decide where CPM “lives” in your organization: Finance, IT, Operations or a
cross-functional center of excellence
- Determine and document the business case for CPM, including:
- Revenue growth
- Cost management
- Systems rationalization
- Cash cycle velocity
- Fixed-asset utilization
- Visibility and accountability

Operational
- Connect CPM to your management system, and look at CPM processes to create competitive advantage
- Connect financial and operational models and scenarios into your planning processes
- Provide financial, operational, and predictive analytics to your business analysts and managers
- Integrate your IT roadmap with CPM
- Inventory your CPM processes and align them with your roadmap

Tactical
- Leverage your technology investments
- Rationalize systems and standardize where appropriate
- Upgrade to functionality that gives you business benefit
- Leverage your data assets
- Expose data quality issues
- Implement the CPM umbrella on-top of your transactional systems and data warehouses
- Implement a robust data governance policy and methodology

They finished with: "An integrated CPM system, the backbone of your management operating system, is the foundation for building an agile enterprise."

Oracle BIWA Summit 2008

The Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics Summit 2008 happened last week (December 2 - 3, 2008 at Oracle's World HQ).

According the Conference's Organization :The BIWA Summit offers outstanding value for BI professionals who use Oracle technology. With this entire event focused on business intelligence, warehousing and analytics, get the knowledge and information critical for your work.

Here are some links with news, posts, and articles about the conference:

- Oraclebiwa

- Oraclebiwasig

- Rittman Mead Blog
. Day 1 BIWA
. BIWA Summit - Day 2

- Oracle Database Insider Blog - Roccaforte on Oracle Exadata

- James Taylor - He did a very nice coverage, with several posts about the Conference.
. Live from BIWA Summit - Competing on Analytics
. Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM)
. Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations
. From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets
. Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining
. Oracle's BI Strategy
. Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP
. Fraud Detection with Oracle Data Mining

Management Excellence

In July of this year, Frank Buytendijk introduced the concept of Management Excellence in his Oracle's blog and launched The Journal of Management Excellence.

He wrote: "Organizations should recognize that the competitive differentiation of operational excellence is diminishing, and that a new competitive wave has started. Organizations should extend their focus on cost, quality and speed, to including being smart, agile and aligned.

Creating management excellence is the goal of performance management.

Management Excellence is going to be a very important theme for Oracle EPM the coming year."

In October, he launched the issue #2 of The Journal of Management Excellence, with a very nice article about the Office of Strategy Management by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

Today he posted a link to download four white papers about Management Excellence:
• “Management Excellence: How Tomorrow’s Leaders Will Get Ahead” introduces what management excellence means, and describes the Oracle management process framework called Strategy to Success (S2S)
• “Management Excellence: The Metrics Reloaded” discusses the performance indicators that organizations should focus on when they adopt Strategy to Success
• “Management Excellence: From Strategy to Success” details the S2S processes and introduces a blueprint to map your own management processes
• “Management Excellence: Techniques and Technologies” highlights important techniques that an EPM System must offer in order to support Strategy to Success.

Oracle is doing a great work and those are excellent materials about Management Excellence.

Oracle Open World 2008

Oracle provided this week its Oracle Open World 2008 (September 21st-25th 2008, Moscone Center, San Francisco, United States).

Using Oracle OpenWorld On Demand, you can watch the Sessions and Keynotes (requires free registration).

You can read about in the Oracle Open World's blog and wiki.

Below are some links with posts and comments by DW/BI/PM professionals:
- Mark Rittman's blog
- Blog: Look Smarter Than You Are
- Intellig Ententerprise
. Looking for 'Front-and-Center-ware' at Oracle Open World - Cindi Howson
. Questions Emerge On HP-Oracle Device - Doug Henschen
. Oracle Finally Answers Data Warehouse Challengers - Curt Monash

Business Intelligence Trends: Eye on Compliance

Tomorrow, September 11th at 3PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled Business Intelligence Trends: Eye on Compliance, provided by DM Review and hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson, in its program called DM Radio.


Accordind DM Review: "Which one word strikes fear into the hearts of modern executives? Compliance! Mandates such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and others require that companies pay ever closer attention to their core processes, under penalty of stiff fines, even jail.

Complicating matters is the divergent nature of such mandates. On the one hand, HIPAA requires that sensitive patient data be protected, effectively hidden from unauthorized view. On the other hand, Sarbanes-Oxley seeks to reveal critical information and prevent organizations from hiding financial and process data. Still, there are ties that bind these mandates, and there are best practices for helping to ensure compliance while also improving operational efficiency.

Meanwhile, the rise of compliance has been a boon for software and services companies, who are finding new and creative ways to help organizations remain compliant. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear from the experts about what your organization can do to achieve compliance and also reap other benefits from compliance-related initiatives. We'll talk to: Compliance Weekly Editor in Chief Matt Kelly; Oracle Senior Director Michelle Shannon; and Exeros Vice President Todd Goldman.

Attendees will learn:
- The invaluable role of business rules management systems
- How data governance boards can help or hinder compliance
- Why it pays to be responsive to auditors
- The increasingly important role of application logs
- How a strategic view of compliance can pay serious dividends."

The Governance, Risk and Compliance(GRC) was driven by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and nowadays is an important issue to the companies.

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

The DM radio is an excellent initiative by DM Review to spread knowledge with expert professionals in interesting subjects.

Frank Buytendijk announces his book called Performance Leadership

Frank Buytendijk announced yesterday, in his blog, that his book called Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders, and Lead Your Industry to came out.

It is a good news, because Frank is an experienced professional, and knows Performance Management deeply. He is Oracle's Vice President of EPM Strategy, and always writes good posts in his blog.

It is interesting how he announced the book, starting with the title of the post: Performance comes from Venus, Management from Mars. He described: "Performance has everything to do with passion, motivation, dedication, skills, teamwork. Performance is about People. Management is all about control, procedures, guidelines and regulations. Management is about processes and systems. In other words, Performance comes from Venus, and Management from Mars.

Seen this way, ‘performance management’ is a bit of a contradiction in terms. I have been exploring this idea for the last three years, and many of the posts in this blog have been inspired by this journey. And this journey has had a deliverable that I am very proud of…"

I am anxious to read this book.

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

Recently, Forrester published the report The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008, written by Boris Evelson. You can get a free copy courtesy of SAS.

This report is an evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, and according it, Forrester conducted lab-based evaluations in March 2008 and interviewed 12 vendors and 24 user companies, including Actuate, IBM Cognos,Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software, QlikTech, SAP, SAS Institute, and TIBCO Spotfire.

The report considers that Business Intelligence is not just for reporting anymore, and now expand into the following eight major BI product functionalities:
- Production/operational reporting for pixel-perfect mass report distribution
- Ad hoc query tools provide a quick answer to a business question
- OLAP tools, when business questions are more about “whys” than “whats”
- Dashboards as an interactive, visual UI — not a reporting or analytical tool by itself
- BAM to report on real-time data and process information streams
- Predictive modeling answers questions about what’s likely to happen next
- BI workspaces enable true end user self-service
- Guided BI search tools support free form ad hoc queries and analysis

The report also considers the Evaluation Criteria are Current Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence and the Evaluated Vendors Must Meet Architecture, Functionality, and Scalability Criteria. IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy.

About the leaders: most large enterprise BI vendors finally “get it” and offer robust, scalable, well-integrated BI platforms with rich and broad BI functionality, and highlighted:
- Business Objects, an SAP company, provides some of the best-in-class tools for each use case
- IBM Cognos provides one of the most modern and scalable BI environments
- SAS is the best one-stop BI shop that includes high-end analytics from a single vendor
- Oracle brings the best of its rich BI portfolio into Enterprise Edition Plus

Forrester always writes interesting reports. This report is a good way to the companies get an overview about the main features of the main BI platforms.

Wal-Mart Selects Oracle for Business Intelligence

This week, Oracle announced that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, selected Oracle BI Suite EE Plus to provide comprehensive data intelligence and analysis from across Wal-Mart's operations.

According Oracle:
- Wal-Mart plans to use the system to administer its logistics, transportation, category management, finance, human resources, real estate, merchandising, store and club operations and other business resources, within Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs.
- Wal-Mart selected Oracle for its proven track record of success in the retail sector, and Oracle BI Suite EE Plus for its ease of use, scalability and ability to integrate with other applications in the Wal-Mart environment.


Rollin Ford, VP and CIO of Wal-Mart, said:
"Technology and analytics are essential to help us be more responsive and effective in serving Wal-Mart customers and Sam's Club members. The Oracle solution is very robust and it integrates well with our other applications, particularly as our business continues to grow in scale and complexity."

Oracle announces the next-generation release of EPM System

Oracle announced last Wednesday, July 16, its Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System.

The news was published in the Oracle's press release, and in my opinion, the most important features are:
- The Oracle EPM System represents a significant milestone in the integration of Hyperion's market-leading performance management applications and business intelligence (BI) technologies with Oracle Fusion Middleware, including Oracle's scalable BI foundation, and Oracle Applications.
- Enhanced integration with the Oracle E-Business Suite enables drill-through from EPM applications directly into transactional systems for faster, more accurate analysis.
- New read-write integrations with Microsoft Office.
- Built on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) standards, the Oracle EPM System is hot-pluggable and integrates with non-Oracle data sources and platforms such as SAP.
- Oracle EPM System is available now on Windows Server platforms.

Oracle is investing hard in the dispute with the other big competitors, mainly Business Objects/SAP and IBM/Cognos, by the lucrative and increasingly growing market of Business Intelligence and Performance Management.

Oracle and Pentaho announce BI applications to the iPhone

Last week, Pentaho and Oracle launched their BI applications to use in the iPhone.


According Pentaho's press release, published on 9 Jul:
"Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of a new Pentaho iPhone application which provides native iPhone web navigation of Pentaho BI content. The integration is available today, and was developed using the iUI project, currently hosted on Google Code.
"We've delivered another 'first' in BI with Pentaho's BI extension for iPhone," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho Corporation. "Getting the most out of our commercial open source model means continuously delivering compelling new capabilities on open source, and we look forward to continued innovations in partnership with our global community."



According Oracle's press release published on 10 Jul:
"- Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced the first in a series of free Oracle business applications for the Apple(r) iPhone - Oracle(r) Business Indicators - will be available on the Apple App Store beginning today.
- These new Oracle business applications address how busy executives and managers work today - requiring targeted, intelligent and task focused information to make informed decisions with ease and simplicity with today's increasingly mobile work style.
- The applications leverage the power of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition to provide access to key metrics and analytical data for mobile executives."