Automated systems can work for small companies, too: all the focus on sophisticated BPM systems with dashboards and scorecards has some smaller organizations concerned about costs and the ability to handle complexity. But new, simpler systems can allow them to cost-effectively move beyond spreadsheets for managing the business.

• Author: Scherpenseel, Chris

As competition grows ever fiercer in today's business environment, so does the attention to detail that savvy business managers must pay toward every piece of their organizational performance. They want immediate access to key performance indicators (KPIs) and related data that will help them better understand what's driving the health of their business.

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From revenues and capital expenditures to lease and payroll outlays, much of this information is housed in their organization's finance department. This is also the group of employees who best know how to analyze that data and assess how it influences business performance. Thus, for businesses aspiring to more proactively manage business performance, unlocking greater insights within their financial data is almost certainly the ideal place to start.

A growing number of companies, particularly those with at least 500 employees, are starting to adopt Web-based, dashboard- and scorecard-oriented software to help business decision-makers gain a unified view of their organizational KPIs in real time. Dashboards are gaining popularity because they simply and graphically convey what's going on across various points of the business: If the arrow is pointing up and the light is green, performance is good; if the light is yellow and the arrow is pointing down, it's time to start paying closer attention.

As good as such dashboards are at providing this snapshot view, though, organizations require more extensive tools in order to achieve true business performance management (BPM). Gathering and consolidating the numbers is only step one: from there, executives need to determine what's influencing those figures, share those findings across departments or teams, and enable divisional managers to effectively shift course as needed. When organizations struggle or fail with efforts to implement dashboards and scorecards, the cause is often an inability to turn raw data into business intelligence and turn that intelligence into action.

A new generation of financial analysis software applications has emerged in recent years to address these needs. Yet many small and midsized businesses remain hesitant about adopting such technology, often because they're concerned about the costs and complexity of a full-fledged BPM software suite.

They've heard others lament the time and money it takes to install and configure a robust solution, the intensive IT resources needed to manage it, the extensive data marts that must be built for the BPM software to draw up-on, the security and user-access issues involved and the lengthy process of training end users on a new system.

As a result, many continue to rely on spreadsheets and piecemeal reporting tools to perform budget analysis and forecasting. In the process of...