Did Somebody Say Strategy?

Top Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management Blog Entries

Here is a round-up of some interesting (to me) blog entries:

BI changes in 2011 – but to what?
The simple answer is that it’s about providing real-time business intelligence to people to support their decisions, not instead of, but in addition to traditional BI analysis of past success or trends. A more complex answer is that this is a completely new environment in every sense of the word mea...

Best-in-class BI – Display, Insight and Action
I was talking to a colleague about the benefits that an operational BI solution provides and we came to the conclusion there are three levels of increasing value: Displaying relevant, timely, accurate data based on the person’s role and responsibility within the context of a business process or valu...

Designing Your BI Competency Center
In which Jill talks about designing a competency center. (That’s right, we said “designing.”) In my vast experience as a BI and data integration consultant… (Okay now is when you think to yourself, “Wait, she looks pretty young, so how vast is it really? I mean, she can’t be more than 32 or 33…”) An...

Social Entrepreneurship, Corporate Social Responsibility and Shared Value
Anti-business sentiment may have increased in the U.S. with the Enron scandal in 2001. It further increased as income inequality started to get news coverage and reached a high degree of notice with the economic crisis of 2008. In response to this trend first social entrepreneurship emerged as a top...

BI Licensing &Lawsuits: A Sure Sign of Failure
Software licensing is never an easy topic, for either the buyer or the seller. For buyers, its so much easier to discuss features and capabilities and whether or not the product is a good fit. For the seller, its so much easier to highlight why their company and product is the best. So you do your p...

“Creating Shared Value”…
… is the title of the leading article in Harvard Business Review for January/February 2011. Given the article is jointly authored by Michael Porter, perhaps the world’s best known business school professor, it is likely to be very influential. It is an exceptional article about the need for capita...

All Work is Networked
Networks support every level of situational complexity The essential nature of work is humans interacting with other humans - the people behind the computer, the processes, and the machines. There is a big difference between the way real people work and the mechanistic approach of the production lin...

‘Stretch goals’ tend to stretch all the way into fraud
Goal setting works. Give your employees some concrete goals and they will work harder to reach them than when you just tell them “do the best you can”. There are ample studies confirming that relation...

Big Themes in BI for 2011
There is nothing like a fresh snowfall and a new year to reflect on the hot topics in BI for 2011. Here is my list of the five most important trends for the year ahead. 1. Advanced visualization a...

Is Your Consultant Enriching Your Judgment — or Retarding it?
by Brook Manville (Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and Tom Davenport are at work on a book on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organizational, not just individual, strength. As their research prog...

The Strategic Reader - Dec 2010
Here is a quick summary of some interesting articles on strategy in late 2010: Ten Tech-Enabled Business Trends to Watch: McKinsey Quarterly . McKinsey has highlighted an earlier list of trends to w...

Seven counterintuitive truths for managers [Blog]
How do you get customers to send bouquets to staff for great service (literally) yet cut costs at the same time? By discarding (almost) everything you think you know about management and doing the opp...

Proposed Themes For BI Trends 2011
Business Intelligence remains a top priority for companies. A successful BI has a positive impact on business performance, helping companies make better decisions at every level of the business from c...

The Biggest Mistake On Sales Capacity Planning Models
I enjoy building capacity planning models. Yeah- I am weird like that. LOL. As you may know, we use capacity models to predict demand, predict productivity, predict costs and predict outputs (e.g. sal...

Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution
Published: November 22, 2010 Author: Robert Simons Business leaders can't develop and execute effective strategy without first gathering the right information, says Harvard Business School professor R...

Overall Marketing Effectiveness (OME)
I was discussing marketing metrics with our CTO last week as we seek to define new performance measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help marketing professionals understand and improv...

The Job of an Innovation System in Your Business
I’ve written a great deal about idea and innovation management. But at the end of the day what is the job of an idea and innovation management system in your business? Let’s try to get clear on this...

Do Your Team a Favor: Stop Acting Like IT
(Caution: This blog may contain ideas that are hazardous to your career.) I’ve argued in previous blogs that business intelligence (BI) professionals must think more like business people and less li...

John Kotter: Four Ways to Kill a Good Idea
Published: October 6, 2010 Authors: John Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead Someone is out to shoot down your best ideas. Do you know how to defend yourself? In their new book, Buy-IN: Saving Your Good Id...

Bridging Process Modeling and IT Solutions Design at adidas
Eduardo Gonzalez of the adidas Group talked about how they are implementing BPM within their organization, particularly the transition from business process models to designing a solution, which ties ...

Seven Characteristics of Key Performance Indicators - KPIs
"Performance measurement is failing organizations all around the world," says author David Parmenter in his new book " Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs " (2010, John Wiley & Sons Inc.) The reasons include a ...

Using Cynefin
I was on YouTube earlier today checking out on our new video on the Cynefin framework which is doing well in terms of hits although its not anywhere near the Childrens' Party story yet! I hadn't realised that there is other material up there, Three n...

Polymaths see the bigger picture
One of my big themes these days is to look at the huge opportunities available to businesses that transform their operations, cost base or market reach through their use of the cloud. So I’m looking forward to meeting up this week with my Enterprise I...

Value Networks Monitor Hidden Value

Standards and XBRL for Intangible Asset Management Value network modeling and analytics are in the forefront of non-financial business reporting. The Value Networks data model is fully XBRL enabled and it is the only scalable business modeling methodo...

Mindmap Retail Intelligence Presentation
This is the mindmap that I used for the Retail Intelligence presentation that I gave at the microstrategy event. It mentions the trends in BI and Retail and how they come together. If you are interested in receiving the slides drop me an e-mail. ...

From Data Warehousing to Performance Management
Next year marks the 15th anniversary of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), an association of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) professionals that has grown nearly as fast as the industry it serves, which now tops $9 billion according...

Have we really understood what Business Intelligence means?
Everyone wants ‘business intelligence’ (BI) but have we failed to grasp the gap between what the business managers want and what conventional BI reporting delivers? I was ‘socialising’ this point with a former colleague whose views are always interest...

Sent from my iPad

Book Review: Dealing With Dilemmas

Dealing With Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short
Frank Buytendijk, John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Once again, Frank has produced a work with a very high content-to-pages ratio: there is a lot of stuff in here!  And as he did in Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders, and Lead Your Industry, he manages to combine the philosophical and practical through theories and Real-world examples and case studies.
It's hard to classify "Dealing with Dilemmas," since it cover so many areas:
- strategy & decision making
- scenarios & resource allocation
- risk, ambiguity, constraints, assumptions
- morality & ethics
- alignment & culture
First of all, this is a really good overview of strategy - it's like a Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management crash-course.
And he does a solid job of identifying 6 dilemmas that exist in every business:
- value vs. profit
- long term vs. short term
- top down vs. bottom up
- listen vs. lead
- inside out vs. outside in
- optimize vs. innovate
Then he neatly classifies those into "you versus me" and "now versus later," which both require different approaches.
Given Frank's pedigree, he ties the message of the book neatly into Enterprise Performance Management/Business Intelligence concepts and practices - like the Balanced Scorecard, Resource Planning, Finance, and Analytics.
There are plenty of interesting subjects - I was going to say tangents - in this book (like synthesis, the art of creating options, all the way to time-space dimension swapping, and the bit about meta-synthesis in the end), but Frank brings it all together so none of it feels tangential.  And, being a big fan of closed-loop management systems, you'll enjoy Franks "donut vs. the pretzel" treatment.
At it's heart, I think this is a Change Management book: changing our own context & behaviors - dealing with our own dilemmas - to help improve organization change for the better.  And I'll bet you'll never read another business book that asks "do you want sex, or do you want a cookie?"

1,000 Tweets

I'm coming up on Tweet # 1,000 (you can follow me at  http://twitter.com/rondimon )

My first was on 28 Nov, 2008 ("installing twitter") - almost 2 years ago!

I try to create value-added messages, or re-tweet useful messages for folks in my business communities, namely Finance & IT execs as well as Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence architects and consultants.

For example,

RT @JAdP: #BBBT founder of #Corda 's 9-step KPI Process - see slide 14 of @weckerson 's deck at http://tinyurl.com/26mz5au

The Sorry State of Data Analytics (MIT/IBM study) - http://tinyurl.com/2g7mtnq - start with questions, not data. #CIO

WOW! great eBook on Integrated Reporting. Must read for Finance & IT. #CFO #CEO #MBA #EPM #CPM #IFRS #HBS http://tinyurl.com/2apjtmz

Just answered "“Can you recommend a ...book for planning ... a BI Solution for a company?” on @focus http://tinyurl.com/2fkvv7j

Hope to see you in the twitterverse!

Ron

Enable the debate

Have a look at my guest blog at http://anaplan.com/enable-the-debate/

Bottom line: encourage and enable the debate around sales forecast & pipeline decisions on-line.

June 1: Washington DC Metro Salesforce.com User Group

I'll be presenting a new way of sales forecasting & what-iffing here on June 1 in Arlington, VA:

http://sites.force.com/usergroups/ideaView?c=09a30000000D9xy&id=08730000000He1QAAS

What happened to 'What if'?

Have a look at my guest blog entry over at http://www.anaplan.com/what-happened-to-what-if/

The Art and Science of Forecasting

The July/Aug issue of CFO magazine has a comprehensive article on forecasting that we highly recommend - read Imperfect Futures

It covers a variety of topics including:

• External drivers
• Top-down meets bottom-up
• Forecast Scenarios
• SaaS tools
• Risk integration (eg: optimized hedging strategies)
• Creating more accountability in the forecast
• Prediction Markets (see our post on AMR Research)

Speaking of prediction markets, CFO magazine makes available a free community to try out Crowdcast prediction markets - sign up at http://cfo.com/predictionmarket

It lets you place "bets" on a variety of topics including:

• Capital Markets (# IPOs this quarter for example)
• Economic Indicators (eg: home sales, unemployment rates)
• Topical (when will BofA pay back TARP funds, Emmy for best comedy series, etc)

Here are my current bets

Looks like I’m a bit of a contrarian and slightly optimistic!

A variety of resources

I thought I’d share some resources I use around the web and in print...enjoy:

1. Just found this guy, “Oz” from GA, : http://www.mootbox.com/  “80% Business & Finance Matter, 20% Assorted Randomness” Twitter: twitter.com/osize  - lots of good business book reviews
2. Nutshell Mail : http://nutshellmail.com - delivers  a summary of your facebook, twitter, and e-mail activity to your inbox at predetermined times (a personal aggregator)
3. Cathy Smith - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/cathy-kinneavy-smith/8/1/55a  excellent feature article writer/editor, hire her to do your profiles (business, government, non-profit)
4. http://www.ted.com/index.php   TED - brilliant ideas shared succinctly in video
5. The DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar (ETL) weekly seminar audio podcast, Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
6.  Driven to Perform: Risk-Aware Performance Management From Strategy Through Execution , new book from SAP on GRC and Enterprise Performance Management (more detail in future blog)
7. http://www.missioncontrol.com/ the future of productivity!
8. http://mayogenuine.com/blog/about/ executive coaching: high performance, high integrity, and fun!
9. Imagination Cubed online drawing collaborative online chalk board from GE (free!)
10. What are you thinking?  http://www.managingthought.com/  and upgrade your conversation.

Some of our top Business Intelligence tweets

Properly done BI or dashboard requirements interviews should leave person wanting to keep going, not looking at their watch.  @markmadsen Exactly! that's why we created the Periodic Table of Business: http://tinyurl.com/c459rw

@rondimon you have an interesting approach in yours Periodic Table of Business @marcusborba - Thanks! We use it for Business Intelligence requirements, metrics audits, and Business/IT alignment. http://tr.im/iEqZ

Creating the future: Royal Bank of Canada CEO:http://tr.im/inmX and 3 Laws of Performance:http://tr.im/innh - what's possible?

@marcusborba - Many thanks for the review of the article at http://tr.im/icGJ

From @LTucci - Gartner: IT budgets in 2009 are like a ‘ham and cheese sandwich’ - http://tr.im/i8Vp

RT @cfocoach: CFO's role in navigating the downturnhttp://tinyurl.com/dn2l6t #cfo reduce working capital by tightening up management.

RT @samuelchall ... lots of goodies in the First Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Index -http://tr.im/i22d

Wow - Rohm and Haas implements open source dashboard, saves at least $2M on SAP (BO) costs - http://tr.im/hZ78

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Human Resources has been our most popular blog entry lately: http://tr.im/hSEM

RT @ericbryn: Excellent tips on setting Key Performance Indicators for your company http://bit.ly/FRqz - also seehttp://tr.im/hPI5 #KPI

What IT really needs is more business direction -http://tr.im/hPGS - this usually results in Business Intelligence initiatives #KPI

The future financial system

Today’s WSJ had an entire pull-out section dedicated to the Future of Finance

https://futurefinance.wsj.com/ .  These are the findings from last week’s Future of Finance Initiative meetings in DC.

Their top 20 principles for rebuilding the financial system:

(quoted verbatim, except for parenthesis)

1. Strengthen Underwriting Standards
2. Bolster FDIC
3. Regulatory Overhaul
4. Create a New Clearinghouse (for credit-default-swaps, overnight financing, and interest rate swaps)
5. Raise Capital Requirements (no mention of Basel II)
6. Enhance Collateral
7. Smarter Securitization
8. Rating Agency Reform
9. Consistent Regulatory System
10. Constrain Leverage
11. Let TARP Capital be Repaid
12. Executive Compensation (limit government involvement)
13. Transparency Before Regulation
14. Price and Volume Transparency
15. Fed Should be Systemic Risk Regulator
16. Ensure Success of Public-Private Partnerships
17. Accounting Rules (no mention of IFRS)
18. New Resolution Authority for Non-banks
19. Auditors Enforce Consistent Marks
20. Limit Foreclosures”

And the blog from the event is here: 

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/03/25/perspectives-from-the-future-of-finance-initiative/