Integrated risk management (IRM) was a major theme at IBM’s recent Smarter Risk Management analyst summit in London. In the market context, IBM sees this topic as a means to differentiate its product and messaging from those of its competitors. IRM includes cloud-based offerings in operational risk analytics, IT risk analytics and financial crimes management designed for financial institutions and draws on component elements of software that IBM acquired over the past five years, notably from Algorithmics for risk-aware business decisions, Open Pages for compliance management, SPSS for sophisticated analytics, Cognos for reports, dashboards and scorecards, and Tivoli for managing all of this in a Web environment. Putting its software in the cloud enables IBM to streamline integration and maintenance, offer more flexible deployment and consumption options and potentially lower the total cost of ownership.
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Topics:
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Chief Risk Officer,
CRO,
ERM,
OpenPages,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Data Governance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
compliance,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Data,
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Financial Services,
FPM
At this year’s Inforum user group conference, Infor representatives showed the progress the organization has made since last year in transforming itself from a ragbag of mostly small, often obsolete software companies to a competitive vendor of a modern enterprise management software suite. Infor was created by private equity investors employing a “rollup” strategy, aimed at combining smaller companies within an industry to form a single larger company that could achieve economies of scale and greater market presence. Others have tried this in the software industry in the past and encountered difficulty in making it work for two primary reasons. One is the technical challenge of achieving economies of scale in enterprise applications by turning a set of similar but separately developed software pieces into a single offering. Computer Associates achieved economies of scale through acquisition in the 1990s in the IT infrastructure software segment. But it did this largely by forcing customers of the various acquired companies to migrate to its single offering in the specific category. This is not a practical approach for business and finance enterprise applications because customers are willing to go off maintenance and eventually look for another vendor. The second difficulty is that newer or larger competitors can focus on innovation and overtake the rollup company while its attention and resources are focused on stitching the pieces together.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
Social Media,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
closing,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
FPM,
SEC
The idea of devising and using maturity assessments to improve business performance has been a staple of management, functional and strategic consultants for decades. It’s based on two unassailable principles. One is the general assertion that companies differ in their ability to do anything along a range from nonexistent to advanced. The second is that at any time it’s possible for a knowledgeable individual to construct a scale of competence for some business function from least to most mature based on the important characteristics about how an organization designs and executes that function. Using maturity scales is a handy way for executives and managers to size up where they lie on a continuum of capabilities and an easy way to define the steps necessary for improvement. Maturity assessments have the advantage of being straightforward, but there’s the danger that they can be overly simplistic.
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Topics:
Performance Management,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
benchmark,
FPM
Two key themes that emerged from Larry Ellison’s Sunday night keynote at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld were faster processing speed and cheaper storage. An underlying purpose to these themes was to assert the importance of Oracle’s strategic vertical integration of hardware and software with the acquisitions of Sun. I try to view technology keynotes like this from the perspective of a practical business user. Advancements such of these are important because enhancing the performance and cost-effectiveness of IT infrastructure can drive substantially improved business capabilities. As I’ve noted in the past, the ability to rapidly process large amounts of data provides business users with significant new capabilities in areas such as complex event processing, social media analytics and the ability to analyze unstructured or semi-structured data. In planning, it has the potential to change how companies perform a wide range of analytics-driven processes, especially in areas such as planning, budgeting and forecasting. It makes it feasible to more fully explore the impact of different courses of action, because rather than having to wait hours or days for answers to questions that start with “What happens if we…” the answers come back in seconds. Review and planning sessions can focus more on what’s next rather than rehashing history.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Customer Experience,
executive,
Business Analytics,
Data Management,
In-Memory Computing,
Information Management,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Business Process Management,
Data,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
FPM
One of the community groups to which I donate my time is an organization that puts on a Concours d’Élegance – a vintage car show. Such Concours date back to seventeenth-century France, when wealthy aristocrats gathered to see who had the best carriages and most beaudacious horses. Our Concours serves as the centerpiece to a broader mission of raising money for several charities. There a many such events in the United States and elsewhere, but this one, which has been held every year since 1956, has the distinction of being the longest continuously running Concours in the United States.
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Topics:
Big Data,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
CIO,
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Talent Management,
FPM
Our research consistently finds that defects in data are the root cause of a wide range of problems encountered by modern corporations. The magnitude of the problem correlates with the size of the company: Big companies have bigger headaches than midsize ones. Data issues diminish productivity in every part of a business as people struggle to correct errors or find workarounds. Issues with data are a man-made phenomenon, yet companies seem to treat bad data as some sort of force of nature like a tornado or earthquake – something that’s beyond their control to fix. At best they look for one-off workarounds and Band-Aids without tackling the root causes or recognizing the need to keep data issues in check. Data stewardship can and should be a part of a disciplined approach to management in the same way organizations implement quality control, cash management and legal compliance.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
CIO,
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
FPM
One of the most important trends in business over the past 20 years has been the broadening use of information technology to manage and support activities. In the early decades of business computing, companies developed islands of automation for largely numeric functions such as billing, inventory management and accounting. Each ran on a proprietary system and engaged the time of a relative handful of employees. Today, just about everyone works with an IT system for at least some of their operational or administrative tasks. They rely on these systems to support many of their daily routines, from recording transactions to using analytics to provide alerts, insights and decision support.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Predictive Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Management,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
compliance,
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
financial risk management,
IT Risk Management
Risk has always been an integral part of business, but our recent Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) benchmark research shows that companies deal with risk with varying degrees of effectiveness – especially operational risk. A majority of companies lag in their overall GRC maturity, as I covered in a recent blog post. Operational risk management should be of greater interest to executives today because they can have greater control of it than before. The expansion of IT systems to automate and support most business processes has made it easier than ever to measure, monitor and report on what’s going on in a company. It’s now practical to expand the scope of operational risk management and improve companies’ effectiveness in handling risk events when they occur.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Predictive Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Management,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
compliance,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
financial risk management
Ventana Research recently completed benchmark research on governance, risk and compliance (GRC), three business activities that are naturally linked. Although managing them requires separate and sometimes very different processes, on the whole these activities affect each other: Effective corporate governance ensures compliances with laws, regulations and company policies, and without governance, there’s no way to control risk. Separately or considered together, managing governance, risk and compliance is increasingly important.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Management,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Business Performance Management (BPM),
compliance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
financial risk management
Infor described this year’s Inforum user group meeting as a coming-out party for a large startup company. Such a debut was necessary because Infor had been operating in something of a stealth mode for the past three years: a limited marketing presence, no unified message and a weak, sometimes inconsistent brand identity. It also needed to formally introduce Infor to customers of Lawson, the ERP supplier it acquired last year. The “startup” designation is meant to signal that Infor has been able to render a decade-long consolidation of dozens of smaller companies into one cohesive entity.
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Topics:
Performance Management,
Salesforce.com,
SAP,
Social Media,
Sustainability,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Marketing,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Epiphany,
expense management,
Lawson,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Operational Intelligence,
Oracle,
CRM,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain,
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management
