INTRODUCTION

Business intelligence and performance management are related disciplines and technologies that, in combination, empower us to extract maximum insight from integrated data, use that insight to inform better business decisions, take appropriate direct action based on those decisions and, in fact, do all of the above as a matter of our normal work routine.

EXISTING STATE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence may be aptly defined as a state  –  enabled by an optimum data architecture accessible via specific software  –  wherein business decision makers routinely enjoy fast, direct, user-friendly, continuous and role-appropriate access to a single version of the truth about actual business results, and their relation to standardized metrics, as a foundation for good business decisions.  Activities for business intelligence users generally include monitoring data, analyzing it in detail or obtaining on-demand reports.  Frequently, business intelligence data is organized multidimensionally — the way we naturally think — according to relevant criteria (dimensions) like people, things, products, geography and time.  
In that regard, business intelligence represents close to an ideal state of knowledge capture from data.  However, business intelligence applications usually do not, within their own sphere of functionality, support the initiation of any actions that may be taken based on decisions made from new insights.

“Performance Management” (PM), which is evolving from a combination of business intelligence and corporate financial planning disciplines, is defined by Wayne Eckerson of The Data Warehouse Institute as… “a series of organizational processes and applications designed to optimize the execution of business strategy”.  “Execution” is a key word here and, in performance management, execution typically involves forecasting, planning and budgeting. 

INSIGHTFUL ACTION:  THE IDEAL STATE

Architecture and applications that blend Business Intelligence and Performance Management features can add high value by allowing now-enlightened decision makers to routinely take appropriate action on those decisions using automated, standardized, and collaborative workflows for contributing to, reviewing or approving the specific execution of forecasting, planning and budgeting activities, thereby “closing the loop” and initiating intended changes based on insight supported by hard facts.    Budgeting, in particular, is the activity in most organizations, where plans resolve into changes in resources, tasking and goals.

TWO CHALLENGES

In practice, we often find that not all of the data needed for the desired analyses ever finds its way into a business intelligence application.  On the one hand, some data — which will provide the required real-time key performance indicators for performance management, may not arrive in the business intelligence application until its too late to be valuable.  An example of this might be an airline's real-time data each day about late departures.  Another reason for this is more generalized:  Because of spreadsheets’ (a) continued popularity, (b) ease of use, (c) robust analytic capabilities, and (d) ease of sharing, some high value corporate data continues to remain in spreadsheets, with their traditional weaknesses in terms of version control, accuracy and security.  In the past, this reality has amounted to a major compromise to BI’s promise of “a single version of the truth.”

On the performance management side, although some tasks, such as forecasting and "what if" analyses, are best performed using the available analytic muscle of a business intelligence application, other processes, especially more procedural processes like task assignments, progress notifications, draft submittals, reviews, edits, re-work and approvals, while perhaps based on that same business intelligence data, are inherently very different activities and should normally be performed using the most obvious tools.  As is the case with business intelligence, the popular medium for these processes has been the informal, arcane combination of e-mails and, yes, more spreadsheets, with the resulting convenience, as well as the potential for unpredictability and error that this combination has traditionally offered. 

ENTER PERFORMANCE DASHBOARDS

Performance dashboards are like other dashboards in that they provide busy people with relevent information at a glance.  What makes performance dashboards unique is that they deliver business intelligence and/or performance management information and support the related workflows.  A good performance dashboard will…

* Provide consumers with an appropriate combination of "at a glance" key performance indicators, scorecards, pivot tables and charts, as well as some in-depth, drill-down reports and advanced data visualizations,.

* Be virtually effortless to deploy to user workstations.

* Flawlessly orchestrate the integration of a wide variety of dissimilar data sources, including OLAP cubes, data warehouse tables, line-of-business databases (for real-time performance data), flat files, web-server lists, survey data, spreadsheets and other format, in order to serve as a final, crucial data integration point prior to user views.  All needed data sources should be able to be seamlessly integrated as data sources, so that the end user experiences consistent multi-dimensionality and, of course, accuracy.  As an example of flawless orchestration, various examples of time series information (eg. year-to-date, year-over-year, etc) that originate in dissimilar data sources must integrate transparently.

* Coexist with and, in fact, integrate closely with and orchestrate e-mails as the preferred vehicle for notifications related to performance management assignments, progress notifications, reviews and approvals.

* Support the actual performance management analysis work by managing the storage, security, role-based access, and version control over spreadsheet entries for forecasts, what-if analyses and, most importantly, the budgets themselves. 

* Orchestrate these spreadsheets’ consumption of data from — and secured write-back of new data to — the business intelligence application / data warehouse, such that what-if analyses, forecasts and proposed budgets comfortably exist alongside actual results data in the data warehouse and/or OLAP without danger of losing actual data to inappropriate overwrites. 

Performance dashboards that can do all of the above, especially the controlled orchestration of disparate sources and two-way data flows between the data warehouse and spreadsheets, are truly next-generation solutions that will assist in freeing up information workers to overcome organizational paralysis and close the insight-decision-action loop on a routine basis.

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