[A Strategic View of BI & EPM – Part 2 of 6]    

Are your markets always stable and do your products face no real competition? Are your customers locked in for life? Are your productivity and efficiency unlimited? Do you always have easy access to timely, accurate and consistent performance data? Will your current analytics and reporting continue to support your business far into the future? If you can answer “yes” to all these questions, then congratulations on building the perfect business!

For the rest of us, we may be in organizations with multiple locations, markets, business lines, products and segments. We face demanding customers, evolving technology, and intense competition. Price and cost pressures threaten profitability. The only constant is change.

In such an environment, a proactive Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Strategy is a competitive advantage that can ensure access to actionable information and drive progress toward strategic goals. It’s not enough for organizations to conduct strategic planning and annual budgeting while maintaining static BI and EPM models, and then expect progress to follow automatically. The data your business generates represents a highly valuable asset, and the processes and models to transform this data into useful information need to keep up.

Understanding results requires the right measurements and key performance indicators. Visibility into what influences results enables business leaders to reinforce successful activities and to target improvements where needed. Integration among planning, reporting and analysis activities on a 360-degree basis, horizontally and vertically throughout the organization, promotes enterprise-wide coordination and guards against blind spots.

Periodically revisiting your BI and EPM Strategy to keep it aligned with the corporate strategic plan is essential to ensuring the right information is on hand to improve performance now and as conditions change. For those of us who don’t live in a simple and predictable business environment, a dynamic approach to managing BI and EPM can help our real-world organizations overcome challenges and keep performing at peak levels.

Read other articles in this series:

Part 1 :  How Can BI & EPM Help You Build a Performance Edge?

Part 3 :  How Can a Project & Technology Roadmap Keep Your BI & EPM Strategy On Track?

Part 4 :  Why Do Data Governance and Master Data Management Matter?

Part 5 :  How Can Aligning Reporting and Metrics Improve Enterprise Performance?

Part 6 :  How do you Build and Sustain Best Practices in BI and EPM?