One part writer’s block and two parts schedule overload means I don’t have time to write an original post. Speedlinking to the rescue: Over at ‘I Help You Blog’, Philip suggests 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle. My personal favorite is #101: Create a post with a 101 ideas. In a relatively…
Archive | business intelligence
The Return of Decision Support
According to D.J. Power‘s “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems“, the first use of the term Decision Support System (DSS) was in a 1971 Sloan Management Review article. Gorry and Scott-Morton argued that existing management information systems focused on structured decisions and recommended that systems for semi-structured and unstructured decisions should be called decision…
Traffic Lights redux
As I’m done bashing MBOs (for now), I might as well revisit my long-standing concern with the ubiquitous red/yellow/green traffic light metaphor. While the metaphor is intended as a simple summary of performance (green = good, red = not good), for most business situations three levels of performance are not enough to truly judge results….
Predictions for 2009
As I have in previous years, I had planned to catalog 2009 predictions for the BI and performance management markets to get a sense of how the general consensus might be changing. The new year is nearly a month old and, since I’ve made almost no progress, I was pleased to discover that Timo Elliott beat me to…
Big Bang Performance Management
Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
Predictions, redux
Even though my recent post on BI predictions is still generating higher-than-normal traffic, I assumed that the annual season of prognostication had died down; after all, it’s already Feb. But over on the BI Questions Blog, Timo strays from declaring the death of One Version of the Truth to provide some suggestions that BI/PM vendors…
BI Predictions for 2008
Last month Scoble ignited a debate about why enterprise software isn’t sexy. The blogging world piled on until Nicholas Carr declared it a firestorm. Despite the fact James’ analysis of SAP’s Business User story was one of the larger logs on the fire, I missed the chance to chime in due to my travel schedule…
There Is ROI In Nagging
Picking a controversial or intriguing title for a blog post is a pretty good way to encourage more people to read it. Gary seems to be following this strategy when he titled his latest post “From Nag to Wag – Why Performance Management Now?” And it worked… when the title appeared in my feedreader, I…
Performance Gaps
An operations manager stops by your office (he’s managing by walking around) and says he has good news and bad news. The good news is that the company shipped more widgets to customers last quarter than it did the previous quarter but the bad news is that executive management thinks that we performed worse. How…