Corporate Performance Management: Software Vendors

As we've discussed, Corporate performance management is a step-by-step process, which includes:

1. Defining the goals of a company or business unit (strategic planning)
2. Attaching KPI's and metrics that will be used to measure those goals (benchmarking)
3. Gathering the relevant data for those KPI's and metrics (benchmarking)
4. Consolidating and reporting on that data (financial reporting)
5. Comparing and contrasting the actual performance vs. performance goals (the budgeting process)
6. Making operational and strategic decisions in light of that information (The Balanced Scorecard)

People working in corporate performance management utlitize software tools that ease their day-to-day duties, especially when the task involves gathering and analyzing large amounts of unstructured data.

Software tool categories commonly used for business performance management include:

• OLAP (online analytical processing) - enable users to interactively analyze multidimensional data from multiple perspectives
• Scorecarding, dashboarding and data visualization -  a user interface that is designed to be easy to read, providing the user with a visual representation of KPI's and metrics
• Data warehouses - is a database used to house, report and analyze company data
• Data mining - is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets
• Decision support systems - information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities

There are a plentora of vendors in the Corporate Performance Management space.  The following is a list of the major players in the industry:

• IBM Cognos
• Oracle Hyperion
• Longview Khalix
• SAP
• Prophix
• Tagetik