"Organizations have done a great job and siloed information. CPM takes advantage of all of these," BPM Partners' Colbert adds.
To consider a CPM deployment, organizations that haven't completed at least basic integration of key financial and operations
data need to build those systems first, identifying the key data, what it means, where it resides, and how to access it. "The
majority of companies have the data somewhere," Colbert says. "But the ones with financial systems and transactional systems
in place are the ones that can take advantage of it."
For most others, performance data tends to exist in individuals' Excel spreadsheets, notes Mike Rost, director of product
marketing at ERP provider Lawson Software.
To deploy CPM, organizations need some sort of central data repository -- one or more data warehouses, data marts, cubes,
or databases with a common data architecture -- that can be used as a trusted, audited source of truth, Rost says. That's
not to say that all the data must reside in one data store. Regardless, companies must know where key, validated data is and
that the relevant, agreed-on metadata, business rules, and metrics are accessible to the CPM system. (Companies also have
to have already integrated all or much of that data; otherwise, they won't know whether what they have is relevant, let alone
accessible, Colbert notes.)
For example, product lifecycle management provider UGS uses Hyperion Essbase data cubes; utility Baltimore Gas & Electric
(BG&E) pulls its data from an Oracle Financial database; credit-union services provider Southeast Corporate Federal Credit
Union uses a set of Applix TM1 data cubes; and hospital group Centra Health accesses a set of SAS applications that have a
common data architecture. Except for Centra, these organizations pull their data from various transaction and departmental
systems, "scrubbing" the data for accuracy and consistency and placing it in validated data stores. Centra has the advantage
of already having had to meet regulations that require integrated, consistent data systems, says Kim Price, decision support
manager at Centra.
In some cases, organizations can tap into real-time transaction systems rather than use intermediate data stores, as long
as they know the data is valid and under what circumstances it's OK for managers to see KPIs based on incomplete or unverified
data, IBM's McAuliffe says. He also concedes that managers need to be wary of spending too much time tracking minor variations
in unaudited, real-time data.
Sorting the Essential From the Tangential
After an enterprise has a sufficiently robust data infrastructure in place, the big challenge becomes figuring out what data
is meaningful, trustworthy, and relevant. Ditto on the metrics used to contextualize that data.
For example, in its CPM deployment, UGS found that, although it could get lots of data from its SAP order-entry and service-billing
systems and its homegrown CRM system, some vital data just didn't exist in the SAP data structures, such as revenue from new
customers, recalls Eric Kline, director of IT applications at UGS. So, the company had to develop logic rules to create this
information from other data. "Additional fields may need to be created or captured" in existing systems, he notes.
"We really had to work through what the targets and benchmarks are," Centra's Price notes. That process led to questions such
as "If you are at 99 percent [of a target], is that a negative? Is it 100 percent all the time?" she recalls of the hospital
group's SAS Strategic Performance Manager-based CPM effort. "It's also hard to choose the things where we don't look so good,"
despite the fact that targeting those areas usually leads to performance improvements, Price says.
A CPM effort can also expose -- or be torpedoed by -- internal politics. Because a truly effective CPM system allows no one
to hide their performance or to maintain silos of proprietary information, accessing the right data and metrics can require
navigating difficult political issues. Board members, senior managers, and other authorized users suddenly have access to
the same information at the same time. Because of this, report massaging goes away -- as it must for true transparency. Meta
Group's Poe suggests that IT staff are well-suited to navigate these waters because they "know how to dissect the unknown
-- they're used to change and [to] being transparent from having to share with others on a team." But strong executive support
is ultimately required to ensure real sharing, Lawson's Rost says. Otherwise, "you'll find some people trying to protect their
turf," UGS' Kline adds.
More Analysis, Less IT
After management has bought into a CPM effort, enterprises often discover that proper data discovery and analysis requires
a strong partnership between IT and business staff -- and that effort can easily take 60 percent to 80 percent of the deployment
time, Meta Group's Poe notes. "Don't rush to code," he advises.
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