Greetings from Berlin!

I'm tempted to do a whole ich bein ein thing, but will refrain. The Business Objects European Insight Conference kicked off this morning with dual news, some close to my performance management heart, namely the Performance Suite release which features the integration of the profitability applications on the business intelligence platform ahead of schedule. The other bigger news involves an acquisition of Inxight Software, which is the first attempt to marry the elusive bridemaid of unstructured data to the BI platform.

While this has real, yet tangential benefits to the current EPM marketplace, it's a bold move to address all the data not currently residing in data warehouses these days. More to come on this, and I look forward to comments on this move from my fellow performance guys. I'm itching for a good blog fight--maybe it's me being back in the fatherland again...

How Important is Unstructured Data to Performance Management?

Thought provoking article recently in 1to1 Magazine here on the limits to structured information in impacting organizational performance. Interestingly, some of the points in the article are now taken as fact, they've been repeated so many times: 85% of the information out there is unstructured, business intelligence is only getting to 15% of the people in the organization. (Has anyone really every verified these facts? Where did they come from? Who started them and got everyone else to agree to the numbers? But we digress.)

Now while we can debate forever the merits of dashboards as part of the performance management process, the importance of the data itself in EPM projects is not in question. But what if you're only getting at part of the data--whether it's 15%, 25%, heck even 60% of the data in your database or warehouse.?

Well, it means that there's a ton of data you're NOT getting it--and it could hold the key to solving your business problem. But most companies today are having a hard enough time with just getting at the structured data in their systems--how the heck are they going to get into emails, voicemails, and PDF files?

Unfortunately, there's not one particular answer here, but it's a topic worth exploring in much more detail, as it ultimately requires the three components of EPM mentioned above in order to make it work. We'll revisit this subject later, but good food for thought on how to crack this nut in your organization.