Keeping Pace With the BPM Vendor Shuffle

Most organizations are either in the midst of a project or in the planning stages for improved business performance management. While the directive to pursue this initiative often comes from the CEO or COO, it is the CFO who is usually placed in the driver's seat. This is a mission-critical, high-visibility project that touches most departments in the company. There has always been a degree of risk associated with performance improvement projects, but today's volatile technology environment has increased the level of risk.

Business performance management is designed to enable a company to attain strategic alignment around its key goals and to monitor and manage how well it executes on achieving those goals. Based on both user demand and software vendors' desire to differentiate themselves, the components that comprise performance management today are greatly expanded from where they were even just a few years ago.

Business performance management today has gone beyond basic budgeting, planning, consolidation, and dashboards. It now can include customer and product profitability analysis, predictive analytics, governance, risk, compliance, and operational analytics. Developing requirements as well as selecting and implementing a performance system have clearly become much larger and more complex tasks.

The other aspect of today's technology environment that is playing a role in increasing risk is the vendor landscape itself. There doesn't seem to be a month that goes by without the announcement of another merger of performance management software vendors. Some have perceived this as making things easier -- fewer choices equals less time spent evaluating vendors and fewer chances of making the wrong decision.