My apologies if this is not what you want to hear but I’ve yet to stumble across a tool that brings it all together for the senior executive. I’m still looking for a tool that presents a corporate strategy all the way through execution; in a manner that can be consumed by the C Level. All I’ve seen so far are bits and pieces. Please feel free to comment!

So, how do we get to EPM 2.0?

• The old adage, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Strategies are meant to be discussed, dissected, challenged and cemented. The trick is to then take those strategies and apply drivers, insights and metrics across and deep into the organization. These become your leading and lagging indicators that (if done properly) are directly aligned with corporate strategy.
• Implement the new business processes needed to deliver and support the change in strategy. Everything from supply chain to market campaigns.
• Implement the new management processes as an overlay to the new business processes to execute the change in strategy.
• Enable the above with technology that cascades the strategy execution throughout the organization.

But wait, the above sounds like it’s missing the information delivery piece for the executive. You’re right….and no one is addressing it. Solution: put a gadget on the executive desktop with 4 indicators on it. Not 20 or 100, just 4. You creative types can envision a stop light, a happy face, a speedometer….semantics! These 4 indicators should be the 4 key drivers of the corporate strategy. At first glance they should tell the story; the whole story! The executive has the option to drill through the four indicators into the web of information below it or, they can pick up the phone to have someone in their company address it. That’s their call!

Point being, the closer you get to delivering EPM 2.0 the quicker you can maneuver your company. This assumes you buy into the value of leading and lagging indicators. If you do buy in and you do implement EPM 2.0 from top to bottom….it’s useless without the top brass seeing the 4 driving indicators of their corporate strategy. They need real time insight from a simple presentation layer or, they’ll never use it. If the senior executive team doesn’t drive the organization based on the status of these key strategic indicators then it’s not EPM 2.0. It’s features, functions, cool technology and fancy right mouse clicks!

I sat in on a web demo the other day, because I couldn’t help wonder what “the next generation EPM Platform” really looked like. The title of the invite intrigued me enough to sign up to see what is new or, just around the corner. How different can it be? Well, it depends where you are within the organization!

When I worked for Hyperion in the late 90’s the platform consisted of budgeting/planning, consolidation, BI, scorecard, activity based management and of course reporting and dashboards….and none of the products talked to each other. Then post 2000 the new web architected products and platform came along with a few more products. And guess what, the products still didn’t talk to each other.

Fast forward to today. We’re almost four years after Oracle purchased Hyperion. The suite of EPM products has doubled in size and the integration between the products has improved with the latest FUSION release of the Hyperion product suite. Not 100% there but way ahead of where Hyperion was prior to the acquisition.

So, back to the demo. The user experience looks enhanced from every angle. Nice. Flip here, pivot there; speed of thought. Furthermore, this flexibility goes beyond the end user to the people administering the applications. And with the new platform being 64 bit instead of 32…performance testing will no longer be the deciding driver behind the average purchase decision.

So, is this really EPM 2.0? Not really. The bells and whistles that are added with the latest release make these products light years ahead of where they started. The fact you can highlight a cell, right mouse click and drill through or add comments is super cool. But what if you’re part of the executive team and your company just implemented the new platform? Well, you’d probably be doing things the same way you are today. Except the person you call to get the answer would have an easier time navigating the new functionality to come up with the answers in the 11th hour before that important
board meeting.

Until EPM software can easily align and distribute the strategy of a company, you’ll never get the entire organization on board. And until you make the reporting tool(s) purposeful for the executive team to use, they’ll never use the tools or all their great features and functionality. And until that happens it’s still EPM 1.0 to me.