Wednesday, August 01, 2007

The Performance Management IceBerg


While on a flight to Vegas I was browsing through some of Wayne Eckerson's book Performance Dashboards. I know what you are thinking, what kind of dork reads a performance management book on a flight to Vegas, shouldn’t you be playing video poker and getting your drink on? To that I respond, ever heard of thing called detox, and besides, how can you ever get enough Eckerson, come on, that guy is the man!

What I wanted to point out, or rather revisit is an old visual analogy of the performance management iceberg, a great visual tool for understanding how BI and performance management relate to each other, dashboards and scorecards being just the tip of a much larger beast lurking beneath. Looking back the my time spent analyzing the data warehousing market and speaking with customers about the value of performance management there was always a gap between ETL and overall information management best practices with the sex and sizzle of a cool executive dashboard. It’s always good to go back to the basics, especially when dealing with sales people (did I write that out loud?) and a good visual model is a good as gold, or in this case as good as an iceberg!

Eckerson, Icebergs, time for some vodka, later ya’ll

2 comments:

Darren said...

It's a terrible beast for on-premise vendors, and the worst is going to be Microsoft with their house-of-cards platform requirements for their PerformancePoint stuff. There has to be a better way! People want power without having to build a nuclear reactor in their homes! The BI walls are coming down thanks to the on-demand model. Here's a post you may find interesting: http://www.lucidera.com/blog/index.php/2006/11/15/and-the-walls-came-down/

Nic Smith said...

Although I agree that on-demand BI is the future, there is still a enourmous market that haven’t taken advantage of BI/performance management that will do so in an evolutionary way. There’s no doubt that companies like SalesForce, LucidEra are beginning to pave the way for this business model. The reality is that the commoditization of the BI market with a product like PerformancePoint will drive more implementations and allow more customers to take advantage of BI, in the long run this will be good for the on-demand business as companies look for cheaper and better ways to make sense of their data. What’s holding this back today? Well, let’s not hide the elephant in the room, the biggest thing with the on-demand game plan has always been bringing data into the cloud. Organizations just aren’t comfortable with having their business data floating around in the nebulous. But, we’ve seen Salesforce make huge strides in this direction and there is certainly more to come. I think part of growth of this business area relates back to market readiness, it’s somewhat similar to the evolution that took place with the internet around online purchasing. There was a period of time in the 90’s when buying a product online wasn’t something people felt terribly comfortable with as they weren’t sure what was going to happen with their information. Nowadays, people don’t think twice about purchasing something online it’s part of our lives.
At the end of the day whether the data is in the cloud, under the water, whatever your analogy is, it still has to come from somewhere and an information management strategy that ties data from multiple systems, incorporates unstructured data, and is optimized for front-end things like search is critical. House of cards, software ontop of software, call it what you will, there’s still a 24 billion dollar market out there for BI (according to AMR) which says to this performance guy, this dinosaur our isn’t dead yet.