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Five key questions for performance management on SAP

July 9, 2008

Based on interviews, feedback, and the expertise of analysts and customers, these five questions are key to guiding your selection of a performance management vendor.

They apply to organizations with any combination of datasources, but in particular, to those organizations who have made the choice to have SAP as the cornerstone of their information infrastructure.

1. Is the solution built on a single and complete performance management platform?
2. Is the solution data source agnostic with support for all heterogeneous corporate information?
3. Is the solution independent of IT infrastructures?
4. Can the solution provide true business user self service?
5. Is there a consistent solution roadmap focused on innovation?

Is the solution built on a single and complete performance management platform?

Single and complete does not mean simply from one vendor.

Rather, it means consistent metadata, user interfaces, security, communication, and a seamless interaction among what you traditionally may have viewed as separate software tools in lieu of an enterprise-wide capability.

It means business users are not cutting and pasting reports or tables into intermediary tools to compare numbers – only to invest time diagnosing the resulting errors such operations entail.

Without complete performance management on a single platform, your business can expect higher costs and higher risks. Relying on multiple tools with various levels of incompatibility can mean inconsistent information and a loss of user trust.

The result: IT is forced to waste time gathering and reconciling data and business users return to old habits and don't embrace the power of a Performance management system.

Is the solution data source agnostic with support for heterogeneous corporate information?

You will face multiple versions of the truth without the transparent capability to leverage information contained in all databases, applications, LDAP directories, XML data feeds, data warehouses, datamarts and more.

If the number of "performance management tools to data sources ratio" is more than one to many, you impede the quality, quantity and consistency of decisions.

The decisions arising from performance management rely on information from a unified platform that leverages and extends all SAP, non-SAP and external data sources into a single coherent environment for all users.

This system is conducive to business user self service which is turn generates fast and meaningful business decisions.

For IT, the inability to leverage all data sources causes many problems. Multiple tools to access multiple data sources (a ratio exceeding one to many) leads to increased training, administration, and support costs.

Worse, you may not be realizing the full value of the data in SAP and other sources, compromising your return on investment and overall business effectiveness.

Is the solution independent of IT infrastructures?

Performance management requires interoperability yet clear independence from any and all systems, applications, and infrastructure. Without this independence, you face cost, risk, and agility challenges.

Once organizations start a performance management journey, their needs change far more quickly than ERP or other data source infrastructures evolve.

Basic reporting and analysis may satisfy users at first, but more complex reporting, business dashboards, scorecards, strategy maps, and business modeling typically follow soon after.

If your performance management capabilities rely on specific versions of a data source, web application or portal server, you may face mandatory upgrades or a needless waiting period to enable a new capability or facility in performance management.

You may face additional complications from a trickle effect where one application upgrade mandates upgrades to another…and so on. Costs rise as time and money is spent on repeated upgrades to multiple moving parts.

Can the solution provide true business user self-service?

Without true business user self-service, your IT organization will face a growing backlog of requests for information. Business processes, agility and overall decision-making effectiveness declines, and eventually, people lose trust in the system.

Effective performance management is defined by speed of access, time to answer, and the flexibility to support iterative and randomly changing scenarios.

Relying on your IT department to meet all managed and ad hoc information requests marginalizes them to becoming “information tellers”: you submit a request and then wait for a reply.

It is not sustainable, and drains their resources from managing the system and anticipating future need.

Worse, if access to information is limited to pre-built reports, and planning applications are limited to what IT has built, you have hobbled your ability to monitor, analyze, and react quickly.

Is there a consistent solution roadmap focused on innovation?

When considering the performance management innovation of potential vendors, this is the crucial question: Is the future direction set by the past? Is there:

1. A history of product rationalization and ongoing integration
2. A lack of interoperability across disparate products
3. Capability catch-up because performance management has not been the focus?

Without a clear and credible roadmap, your organization may be buying into an evolving software rationalization and integration project.