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IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence for professional users: Cognos (November 08)

Reporting requirements have changed dramatically in organisations. Previously, professional report authors needed to work with business managers, who wanted relevant information, to understand the business requirements and expectations, translate those business requirements into report requirements, and then feed the reports back to their business managers and stakeholders. Often, they negotiated back and forth between these groups to make any adjustments. These negotiations resulted in a loss of productivity because, in most cases, professional authors were removed from an organisation’s business needs and from the drivers for the report creation. Today, organisations are much more streamlined and the business world is much more competitive. An organisation’s business changes rapidly and frequently, and as a result everything must operate at business speed.

Next-generation reporting: adopting a BPM system: Rinedata (August 2008)

The revolution of improved front-office finance applications is upon us. Organisations require more sophisticated software to assist finance departments with delivering more performance-related information and truly become strategic partners to the operations. As a result, organisations can become more agile and ultimately retain their competitive edge. With today’s staggering pace of mergers and acquisitions and the globalisation of trade, executives recognise the need for a better way to evaluate their strategies and manage change. So how can you be sure that the solutions the vendors offer are the integrated applications they claim to be? How can you be sure that any of them will live up to their claims and deliver the expected benefits once a solution has been purchased? This paper will provide an insight to the evolution of business performance management (BPM) solutions and present a framework to help you evaluate software vendors. You can also read about the vendor selection experiences of both a small and medium-sized enterprise.

Budgeting, planning and forecasting: plan to outperform: Tagetik (June 2008)

In today’s climate, with external credit becoming more expensive and difficult to secure, coupled with increasing operating costs, successful organisations are seeking to move beyond the traditional annual budgeting cycle focused typically just on profit-and-loss analysis, to rolling forecasts that also incorporate balance sheet and cashflow planning to manage their corporate performance. To meet these new requirements, organisations must replace their dated spreadsheet tools with new technologies that can deliver sophisticated financial and planning models. By unifying profit-and-loss, balance sheet and cashflow forecasting, organisations can generate comprehensive and realistic budgets and forecasts, support insightful decisions and, ultimately, plan to outperform the competition.

Unified versus integrated CPM: Tagetik (June 2008)

The new millennium has witnessed a rapid proliferation of corporate performance management (CPM) solutions. The term, first coined by Gartner in 2001, comprises “all processes, methodologies, metrics and technologies that enterprises use to measure, monitor and manage business performance”. Although planning, budgeting, consolidation and reporting are hardly new concepts or solutions, most companies still organise and execute them as separate, isolated activities. CPM, on the other hand, unites these processes in an holistic approach to help companies to translate their business strategy into day-to-day operations and actively gauge their performance in real time. In the wake of major accounting scandals and emerging regulations, more and more companies are turning to CPM solutions to ensure compliance, streamline business processes and drive business performance. Large software players, which have identified CPM’s immense sales potential for their global customer bases, have seized the opportunity to enter this booming market segment. Their quest to ‘fill in the blanks’ as quickly as possible, however, has resulted in a rippling effect of mergers and acquisitions of small, specialised vendors.

Seven myths about data warehouse appliances: Kognitio (October 2007)

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the concept of the data warehouse appliance and the advantages it brings to organisations trying to juggle the demands for increased performance and reduced TCO against the stark reality of everincreasing data volumes. The data warehouse appliance concept is reputed to bring a number of benefits to the customer that cannot be achieved using conventional warehouse technologies. However, other reputed virtues of the appliance, as promoted by the emerging appliance vendors, include the benefit of software that is tightly optimised to the specifically tailored hardware as well as the simplicity of a single source for hardware and software. While promoting these virtues, what these vendors are actually saying is that the genuine benefits can only be accomplished using specialist hardware platforms and that this is the only way to build an appliance. Therein lies the myth. In fact, here are seven myths about the data warehouse appliance that you should know before making your investment.

Narrowing the performance gap in large enterprises: SAP (September 2007)

Business intelligence. Corporate performance management. Business process management. Companies have been experimenting with and/or adopting these three related technologies for decades now in the hopes of improving performance. Yet for too many key business processes, a significant gap remains in most companies between process performance and process importance. Saugatuck refers to this gap as the ‘Performance Gap’. Recently, Saugatuck surveyed 450 senior business and IT executives so as to better understand the implications of the Performance Gap on managing performance. The research suggests that the most successful of these companies are those who have found ways to unify these three tools so as to optimise business processes, share information and make that information more useful.

Narrowing the performance gap in mid-market companies: SAP (Sep 2007)

Virtual data warehouse appliances: Kognitio (September 2006)

Computer scientists have spent decades considering the problem of how to process ever-increasing amounts of data effectively without needing to have more time. The answer has always been somewhat akin to the answer of how one would eat an elephant quickly. In other words, overcome the big problem (a huge amount of data to analyse in a short amount of time) by breaking it down to a large number of small jobs running in parallel. For example, assume you had an acre of grass to mow. If you had 10 people and 10 lawnmowers attacking the problem, you would accomplish the job in one-tenth of the time. This is essentially the theory behind what is known as massively parallel processing (MPP), and it is how today’s largest corporate data warehouses are capable of handling the increasing volume of corporate data along with the increasing amount of analytics run using it. All of this sounds relatively simple and straightforward; however, massively parallel computing infrastructures are both expensive to buy and complex to manage.

Financial consolidation and IFRS: a brave new world?: CODA (July 2006)

In the course of the last two years the world of financial reporting has completely changed. The impact of the mandatory introduction of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) across Europe and their voluntary introduction across the financial reporting regimes of many other countries around the world has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies today. This white paper investigates the long-term effects of this change and looks at the areas where corporate systems can deal with the changes and be run more effectively as a result. The impact of the introduction of IFRS cannot be over-estimated. It has changed the financial reporting landscape in so many ways. Some of these changes are simply technical. But others are not likely to reveal their true impact until experience of the changes has matured.

CPM: Martin Fahy, NUI and David Turner, CODA Group (February 2005)

‘I don’t know what I want ....but I’ll know it when I see it’ Strange words from a successful senior executive in a FTSE100 firm (who prefers not to be named) but they may reflect a reality, which we are uncomfortable in admitting to. There are lots of occasions in organisations when we are simply not sure what the next step is. Sitting around over lunch, the COO and CFO of a large fashion retail outlet in the young adult market are concerned with falling store profitability and more specifically the failure of the firm’s investment in expensive high street locations to generate a significant return to shareholders. The COO wants the CFO to carry out a review of store profitability and to get some answers. The discussion is being facilitated by a high-tech decision support tool – a paper napkin. As the CFO scribbles, the COO interjects and drives the scribbles in a new direction.

Corporate governance and CPM: Ken Sorensen, CODA Group (February 2005)

When we launched our new magazine ‘Enterprise Risk’ in April 2003, the logic behind it was the rise of Corporate Governance up the company agenda – all the way to the chairman of the board in fact. It could have backfired. All the good work on publicising the importance of good Corporate Governance could have evaporated into the ether – just like several important Enron documents. A backlash may have started – with business complaining that governance was stifling the entrepreneurial spirit. But fortunately, or unfortunately depending on which way you look at it, various glaring examples of mismanagement, impropriety and bad practice have shown that the business world still needs to be taught the lessons of Corporate Governance.