Is this BI or PM: New Argument....
This blog is in continuation to another blog on "Biz Analytics to drive Business Performance", published on 29Apr 2010.
Recently, I had a long conversation with a CIO on his BI programme. His organisation spans across 20+ countries. Each country operates different applications, ERPs and source systems to manage their business. London happens to be their HQ. The discussion started with the BI plan on trying to automate timely production of Corporate Reports for the HQ. The BI Plan is to start producing Sales Reports, followed by Financial Reports and later with Operations Reports in a phased manner. Everything looked fine as far as these are concerned. Architecture for the BI Programme resembled a centralised DWH, with lot of data movements from individual country to London. Well, this looks like a huge BI programme with lots of data integration mechanism and data standardisation mechanisms to take care of integrated reporting and automating all those.
Thought about it for a while, and gave an example of a large BI Programme we managed for one of our European customers. This European customer has operations in 15+ countries. We did a rollout for some countries, while some are still in progress. Here we standardised KPIs for Sales, Finance and Supply Chain, created a business framework, and then adopted it at individual country level using their own standard technologies. The local business users had the responsibility for resolving data quality issues. This way, we had enabled the customer organisation exchange standardised data definitions, even though different countries had different source systems and ERPs operating. Here we called the implementation as Performance Management, although the technologies used are BI tools, with different tools at different countries.
Let me take you back to the first conversation with the CIO. When we explained this example, he immediately caught on the idea of Performance Management for his BI Programme, and thought about using a similar decentralised architecture for his organisation as well. Then another idea popped into the discussion on unifying the customer data entry, so they can leverage connects with existing large customers to take new contracts in other countries. Currently, they have difficulty in mapping large customers across the countries and measure their revenue contributions. We discussed this idea and promised to revert with a value-for-money solution.
My colleague who accompanied me for this CIO's discussion had a slight disagreement on the usage of words "Performance Management" instead of "Business Intelligence".
Well the discussion with the CIO started with his centralised BI Programme, and ended with a decentralised Performance Management thought process. Is there a thin line dividing the BI with PM or so? Is it because:
1. Are we referring to the decentralised data management to Performance Management and centralised data management to BI?
2. Are we referring to automation of reports at corporate level to BI? Whereas, implementation with standard set of KPIs at all countries to PM?
3. Are we referring to the bottom up concept of centralised data management to BI, and Top down concept of start with standardised KPIs and Metrics, and adopt a suitable data management to PM?
4. Are we talking more technology in BI and more business language in PM? Is this the reason why we should call something BI and other thing as PM?
5. Are we talking BI, when only corporate obtains reports? Are we talking PM when the whole organisation and all the countries talk similar business language and information exchange?
6. Or are we supposed to call the business speak as PM and the technical speak as BI?
Watch this space for more.......
