The Performance Management Revolution

Chapter 3. The Role of EPM

Enterprise Performance Management is a relatively new term that refers to a processcentric, holistic approach to improving the capability of a business to gain insight and manage its performance at all levels.

The seeds of EPM were present 20 years ago in Decision Support Systems (DSS), which consisted of business analytics presented in a format appropriate for use by executives in making decisions. The strengths of DSS were also its weaknesses—these tools were created by highly trained users for use primarily by a select group of elite users and limited to large enterprises.

DSS solutions also were limited to expensive and complex statistical analysis or standard reporting packages—typically on 132‐column green‐bar paper. Spreadsheets were becoming more popular, but were not connected to corporate data. To analyze corporate data, users had to re‐enter that data from hardcopy reports into spreadsheets—a time‐consuming and error‐prone process. Executive Information systems (EIS) were on the horizon, promising to deliver “high touch” applications for executives to analyze data.

Since the days when “cut‐and‐paste” was cutting edge, business analytics have made huge strides, evolving into what we now know as BI. Today, BI tools and technologies have become more usable, functional, and scalable. Standardization around Web interfaces and Data Manipulation Languages (DML) have simplified their implementation and use.

However, in spite of this, the overall penetration ...