January 15, 2019 Leave a comment

Getting Better at Getting Ready: Scenario Planning for Competitive Advantage

What if you had, ready at hand, an instruction book that told you exactly what to do in the event of any kind of emergency? You would feel more prepared to handle whatever challenge comes at you, wouldn’t you? Maybe you’d feel more confident knowing you always had a “plan B.” That’s what Scenario Planning is: an organization’s instruction book on how to handle major challenges. It’s the process of anticipating change before it happens and building an action plan for when it does. Read more here.

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Filed under Debate, Uncategorized

Getting Started in Business Analytics & Data Science

February 2, 2016 Leave a comment

Good business analysts are “bilingual” – able to speak fluently to both business managers and IT folks.   Here are a few next steps and concrete resources to dive into analytics and start building expertise:

1. Take a course on analytics, like this one from Loras College

2. Join the IIBA and get certified in the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge

3. Read up on better practices, especially books from Stephen Few at http://www.perceptualedge.com and for the fundamentals of information design, I love Edward Tufte’s work

4. Play with some tools:

5. Join a community of like-minded people:

 

 

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Now available: Intro to EPM for Finance Professionals course

January 28, 2016 Leave a comment

I’m happy to announce that my intro to EPM course is available via Proformative.

Click this link to receive a 10% discount when you sign up – you also get access to hundreds of courses on all things Finance from Cashflow to Treasury, FP&A, SOX, and more.

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This CPE-credited course is under an hour and walks through the component parts of EPM and how they all fit together in a management process.

This is a good refresher of the main concepts I cover in my book.

Hope you enjoy the course and all that Proformative has to offer.

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The Enterprise Performance Management Wheel of Fortune

December 23, 2015 Leave a comment

I’m extremely proud to announce I’ll be presenting at ODTUG’s Kscope16 in Chicago in July of 2016.  For details on the event, click here.

One of my presentations is something new this year: the EPM Wheel of Fortune.

wheel

Here’s how it works:

  • An audience member volunteers to spin the wheel (yes, it’s literally a wheel that spins), and it will land on a key driver of value in many organizations;
  • Then, together with the audience, we agree on the definition of the driver and we decompose it into some of its component parts;
  • We take the driver and it’s components and we walk it through the EPM process (see here for more details);
  • When the walk-through is done, we’ll have a good set of initiatives that can give new insights and accountability on the main value driver – and use them for competitive advantage.
  • Then we do it all over again, using a new spin and a new value-driver.

By the end of this session, participants will see a simple process for uncovering new initiatives that use the power of EPM to make a difference in the business.

Hopefully I’ll see you at Kscope16 in Chicago and we’ll have some fun and learn something new together.

Filed under EPM Processes, Strategy

Enterprise Planning & Forecasting Flow – with Oracle Tools

July 27, 2015 Leave a comment

I was asked to elaborate on my last post to include which Oracle technologies address which part of the enterprise planning ecosystem, so here you are!  Please note, there are many ways to implement planning using Oracle tools, these are some of the most widely used.

enterprise planning flow with tools

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Enterprise Planning & Forecasting Flow

July 17, 2015 1 Comment

I was asked to show how all of the part of an organization’s budgeting, planning and forecasting come together and support each other, and how the organization can get more sophisticated at forecasting.  This diagram helped explain the overall flow as well as some of the elements you would want to put on a roadmap.

enterprise planning flow

This should be a good starting place to have a debate about using the right planning and forecasting for better insight into the business, better resource deployment, and better profitability decision-making.

Filed under Commit, EPM Processes Tagged with , , , , ,

Klondike15 – a new Hyperion user conference

January 14, 2015 Leave a comment

klondike15For anyone in the Ohio/Michigan Lake Erie area, there’s a new Hyperion User Conference this February called Klondike.

Check out the agenda and register here: klondike15.com

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8 Report Types for Better Information Delivery

September 11, 2014 Leave a comment

An important distinction to keep in mind while designing and building your management operating system is the classification of information and reports in the Gather process.

Classifying helps you assign the right process, tools, data, and resources to information, reports, and the Gather process. Without an overt classification, you can end up delivering information inefficiently, or worse, incorrectly.

Here are some common classifications:

  • Financial. Usually relates to items found on the Profit and Loss statement, balance sheet, or cash flow. Content can be at a detailed or summary level.

    Enterprise Performance Management, A Management Operating System, EPM, Ron Dimon

    A Management Operating System

  • Operational. Usually contains information about volumes, units, headcount, inventory levels, and so on. Can also be at a detailed or summary level.
  • Executive. Typically cross-functional information at a summary level.
  • Sustainability. Information relating to environmental, health and safety, and community and social issues.
  • Management or Internal. Includes flash reports. Typically contains information managers need to make business decisions before being transformed for external consumption.
  • Statutory or External. Information that has been transformed according to GAAP or other regulatory standards.
  • Canned. Standard reports that are used over and over again.
  • Ad Hoc. Usually one-time information that’s situational and does not need to be retrieved later— although if found useful across different audiences and at different times can quickly find its way into a canned report.

You can learn more about EPM and how it can help your organization build a common business process to execute its strategy in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO)

Filed under EPM Processes, Strategy, Tactics, The Book Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

8 Ingredients to Turn Data into Useful Information

September 4, 2014 Leave a comment

9-3-2014 blog image

Data Consumption Is Undergoing a Major Shift

The most common process in the management cycle is Gather. Organizations spend an incredible amount of time gathering data and trying to turn it into meaningful reports, dashboards, scorecards, and spreadsheets. In other words, turning numbers into knowledge.

The purpose of all this activity is to find out where you are performing well and where you need to make some changes. However, with the plethora of data we’re getting, and with the speed at which change happens and transactions occur, it’s getting harder to find out exactly where you stand. How, when, where, and why we consume data is undergoing a major shift.

To turn raw data into useful information that you interact with, you need at least the following ingredients:

  • A purpose or business question to answer (e.g., “What are our sales by region?” or “Who are our top customers?”)
  • A point of view for the consumer of the information (board, corporate, strategic business unit, line of business, division, team, territory, external)
  • Built-in relationships— hierarchies, dimensions including time periods, apples-to-apples like currency translations, and context— year-to-date, actual vs. plan, etc.
  • The right level of detail (according to business questions and consumer)
  • The right metrics— whether it’s a financial account like revenue, or an operational driver like headcount or a key performance indicator (KPI) or a ratio like productivity, it has to fit the business question
  • Timelines— the information has to be delivered be delivered and consumed in time to do something about it
  • Some comparative information— a variance to the plan or to a prior period or a benchmark
  • The right way to deliver the information to the consumer (the right tool and platform)

You can learn more about EPM and how it can help your organization build a common business process to execute its strategy in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO)

Filed under EPM Processes, Gather, Strategy, Tactics, The Book, The Middle, Understand Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Management Operating System

August 28, 2014 2 Comments

I would like to introduce a framework for thinking about Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence. The genesis of this framework came from my days working at Hyperion Solutions (later acquired by Oracle Corp.). It’s been called a management “operating system” for your company because, like the operating system of your computer, it helps govern input and output and manage what applications (or decisions) are being run and helps make the most effective use of resources (memory, disk space, CPU cycles). You can start anywhere on this closed-loop process to tell the management operating system story, and today I’ll share Gather – the most common part of the cycle, with you.

Enterprise Performance Management, A Management Operating System, EPM, Ron Dimon

A Management Operating System

Gather – While you are busy running your business (Execution, which means service customers, making products, selling in markets), you are generating lots of data. You gather that data and transform it into useful information (according to its context) and deliver it to the right people (according to impact and areas of responsibility).

This is the place where managers consume reports about the results of the business. It’s where they answer the question “where are we, right now?” Depending on your industry and your business, there are generally two kinds of reports: mostly financial and mostly operational. The trend has been to combine financial and operational information on one report, which is a good idea since the two are interrelated: financial investments help drive operational results, and effective operations help contribute to financial performance.

Reports are delivered in a variety of formats with a variety of tools and can be categorized as:

  • Canned (static) reports
  • Ad hoc or interactive reports
  • Dashboards and scorecards
  • Spreadsheets

Reports give their readers a snapshot of what results have been produced to date to help them gauge how close to their goals and targets they are.

You can learn more about EPM and how it can help your organization build a common business process to execute its strategy in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO)

Filed under Commit, Debate, EPM Processes, Gather, Strategy, The Book, The Middle, Understand Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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