Beyond BI: benefiting from corporate performance management solutions; There's a trend towards developing company-wide solutions as businesses learn that integrated, business analysis applications can significantly improve operations. In this environment, CPM is fast becoming an established function.

• Author: Miranda, Steven
• Position: Business Intelligence

Corporate performance management (CPM) is one of today's hottest topics, in the software world. Vendors are touting it, corporations are bragging about using it--whole conferences revolve around it. Industry leaders have even built a forum designed to collect best practices for implementing CPM.

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Yet many corporations don't quite understand what CPM is or why businesses need it. This may stem from the fact that the idea sometimes goes by other names, including "business performance management" (BPM) and "enterprise performance management." Whatever words or acronyms are used, CPM is most often discussed in terms of compliance with legislation such as The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires businesses to demonstrate financial transparency, accountability and compliance. While CPM does offer more visibility into the financials of a corporation, it can and should do much more.

As more enterprises turn to CPM to meet their challenges, its value becomes clearer. Their experiences have helped formulate a better definition for CPM and serve to teach other businesses the best methods for deploying a robust CPM solution. That means it's getting easier to understand what CPM can do for an enterprise and how businesses should go about implementing it.

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More Than Business Intelligence

Technology research and advisory firm The Gartner Group defines CPM as "an umbrella term to describe the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise." That describes far more than a tool to manage financial data.

A good CPM system offers users visibility and control, risk mitigation and increased efficiencies in their businesses. But in order to make CPM work properly, businesses must take a holistic view, making CPM a part of every segment of their businesses, from accounting to human resources to customer service.

One way to understand more about CPM is to describe what it isn't. CPM isn't simply business intelligence (BI). It's not a tool implemented into a single department that analyzes data. It's not deployed reactively based on outside events. And it doesn't merely focus on history.

Instead, CPM is the real-world insight delivered across a suite of applications with embedded business processes that essentially sits on top of the reporting foundation that BI creates. It's an enterprise-wide tool that is used to offer reports and analysis and also to integrate that data with planning, budgeting, forecasting and...