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

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)

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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 , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

3 Benefits of Using EPM in Your Organization

August 21, 2014 Leave a comment

EPM was designed to fill the strategy to execution gap. It’s the new approach to management that makes strategy everyone’s job, that gives them the tools and processes to execute based on focus, alignment, and accountability. Let’s discuss three of the five benefits of EPM that I share in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO):

  1. Management Efficiency

    Enterprise Performance Management. Difference between "Run the Business" and "Manage the Businesss"

    Differences between “Run the Business” and “Manage the Business”

EPM enables standard management processes that every company must do well: Budgeting, planning and forecasting Financial consolidation and statutory reporting Management reporting and business intelligence Profitability analysis, and Other financial and operational modeling, planning, analysis, and reporting EPM leverages the investment you have already made in Enterprise Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Sales Force Automation, and other transactional systems.

  1. Executing Strategy

EPM can help close the loop between what you want to happen in the business (and how), and what actually happened (and why): Records and documents business model assumptions, constraints, and drivers Connects those models into your annual operating plans, budgets, and forecasts Monitors and alerts exceptional variances from actual to plan Helps you understand the root causes of variance and plug that corporate knowledge Ties it all together with a common business language and common master data to improve visibility, focus, and alignment Giving more stakeholder alignment .

  1. Improving Performance

EPM can have a material impact on the top and bottom line, on the balance sheet, and on overall return on capital: It can improve visibility into the key drivers of value in the business. It can show the cause and effect relationship of operational metrics on financial performance. It helps you focus on the right things in the business. It can bring agility to business models and organizational structures. Giving better business decisions that are based on more timely information

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

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

Top 7 Signs Your Organization Needs Enterprise Performance Management

August 14, 2014 Leave a comment

In working with my clients across a wide spectrum of business sizes, industries, and geographies, when it comes to EPM, there are some “buckets” of pain I have found common to them all. Here Enterprise Performance Managementare 7 reasons your organization needs EPM:

  1. More time is spent on assembling the numbers than on analyzing them— all this manual effort makes us inefficient and not very scalable.
  2. People show up to meetings with “their” numbers, and we don’t know how they got those numbers—there is not a lot of confidence.
  3. Some people aren’t getting the reports or analyses we’re sending out— it either gets lost in their email or the right people aren’t on the distribution list (or they’re ignoring it).
  4. There is little alignment across functions (Sales, Marketing, Development, HR).
  5. People aren’t following the prescribed processes, especially for submitting their plans and forecasts—they make different assumptions and interpret what we want differently.
  6. The right people don’t have access
  7. Sometimes the data is just plain wrong— it doesn’t include the latest numbers or it’s an old version, or it’s missing parts.

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, The Book Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Data Consumption is undergoing a major shift

May 14, 2013 1 Comment

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
—PLATO

As EPM practitioners, our job is to help deliver better insights to the business, and the starting place is delivering useful information: on time, at the right level of detail, to the people who can use it to make a decision that helps improve short and long-term results.

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: Read more of this post

Filed under EPM Processes, Gather, Strategy Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

8 Principles of Enterprise Performance Management

May 7, 2013 Leave a comment

This is a list of what most of my clients tell me they want.  I propose that this list is exactly what EPM delivers.

So unless I hear otherwise, these are the 8 principles of enterprise performance management:

  1. We have a lot of data, we’re getting more every minute, and we want to use it to compete better;8 robots
  2. To use all that data, we want to gather it and transform it so that it makes sense;
  3. We want new insights into our business, based on the facts gleaned from the data;
  4. We want to know what levels of performance are possible in our industry, for our business, in the future; Read more of this post

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CFO and CIO join forces to serve “The Business”

April 25, 2013 Leave a comment

Organizations that have implemented Performance Management more broadly are nearly four times more likely to be among the most competitive organizations in their industry.

—Brian McDonough, Research Manager, Analytics and Data Warehousing Software, IDC, Financial Performance and Strategy Management Survey of Buyer Priorities for 2011, Doc #226261, Dec. 2010

Harvard Business Review advocates that business and IT shouldn’t just be aligned, they should be ‘‘forged together.’’  (David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats, ‘‘Radically Simple IT,’’ Harvard Business Review, March 2008.)  One way HBR says you can do this is by having the CIO report directly to the CEO or COO, not the CFO. While I have seen this reporting structure in many of our client organizations, it does not automatically mean that IT and the business are forged together, or even aligned for that matter. Certainly the business analyst (BA) role has done much for crossing the chasm, in both directions, for IT and the business. And where I see the most successful financial systems implementations are where there the finance/information systems (IS) role acts as the BA. But this is still not a guarantee for a meeting of the minds between business and IT.

2 way arrows

Photo © Ruth Dimon, 2013

I propose five ‘‘better’’ practices for closer IT/business alignment based on my client engagements over the last 30 years: Read more of this post

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Closing the Strategy-Execution gap

April 22, 2013 1 Comment

In March 2010, Harvard Business Review surveyed

Photo © Ruth Dimon, 2013

Photo © Ruth Dimon, 2013

1,075 readers about strategy and execution in their organizations.
Only 37% said their companies are ‘‘very good’’ or ‘‘excellent’’ at execution.

What is it that keeps us from having a sustainable process for executing our strategy?
On the one hand you have your strategic objectives, including:

  • Profitable Revenue Growth
  • Customer Success
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Employee Engagement
  • Cash cycle velocity
  • And so on.

On the other hand you have available resources at your disposal:

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