Savvion October 2006 Newsletter

We're sure you've often wondered how some of those acronyms actually help your organization. We asked Guy Weismantel, Senior Director at Business Objects, how operational BI and BPM work together to drive performance. Here's what he has to say about process improvement, technology, and how businesses can rise to new challenges - and where BPM solutions like Savvion play an important role.

SAVVION CONNECT: Hello Guy, welcome to Savvion Connect. First of all, can you tell us about your role at Business Objects?

GUY WEISMANTEL: Thanks for having me! My role at Business Objects is to manage and direct our enterprise performance management marketing strategy out there in the marketplace.

SC: Sometimes it's alphabet soup out there! What is the difference between EPM, EIM and BI? Or in other words, how do they work together?

GW: It certainly gets tricky, and there are a lot of different flavors of business improvement out there, but let me try to wade in and make some sense. BI, or business intelligence, is really an umbrella term for software that allows you to track, understand, and manage your business. Now you can do that in a variety of ways, and one of the fast emerging software categories that helps with this process is enterprise performance management, or EPM. Performance management at its essence allows you to actively manage your key metrics and goals to ensure you're addressing the key business drivers within your organization.

Finally, since you generally need to grab data from a variety of different sources and systems in order to make a good business decision these days, it's important that your organization have a sound strategy for dealing with all of these data driven issues. And that's where the 3rd acronym, EIM, or enterprise integration management, comes into play. EIM is a way to ensure you have data quality and integration so that you have a high degree of trust and reliability in the data you're using on those dashboards and graphs to make the right decision.

So although it can get a bit tough to keep all the terms straight, they're highly connected and all work towards helping you solve the same issues within your organization.

SC: BI companies like Business Objects help customers track performance, understand business drivers, and manage the business. But how do your customers map their daily business processes or rules into this intelligence, or basically where does BPM fit in?

GW: It's a great question. BI really derives its value when there's a strong connection between "how" a person does their daily job, and "what" information they need to do that job. We work with companies like Savvion to make that connection. If you're in sales and there's a customer profitability analysis report that would help you target a certain segment of customers for a promotion, that's great—but if you have to hunt around for it, log into three different systems to find it, or make a request to IT and wait a day for it, it's ultimately not very useful to you. However, tie that report to the process you use in developing promotions, and now you've got something. And it's when this connection is made that we find our customers get the greatest return from their investment in our products.

SC: What do customers need to know about implementing BPM on top of an existing BI infrastructure? What have you seen that makes this successful?

GW: Well from our perspective, the customers that have been most successful at linking BPM and BI follow two basic tenets. First, they find the intersection where they have processes that require information to make the best decision—these kind of "BI intensive" processes lend themselves well to bringing these two pieces of technology together.

The second tenet that the successful companies follow is that as they find these intersections, they solve that problem first vs. extending this out to the entire organization in a big-bang approach. Tying in BI to BPM can be heady stuff, requiring not only technological change, but oftentimes cultural changes in how people do their jobs. But by starting smaller and gaining proof points, we've seen rapid-fire expansion of the technology once people see what it can do for them.

SC: What sorts of requests do you hear from your EPM customers around collaboration, control, and continuous improvement over their business processes?

GW: It's an interesting question, and one that comes up more and more these days. Staffing is tight, and with mergers and acquisitions, you find yourself on new teams with unfamiliar colleagues in different time zones—how do you ensure that your team is performing to its plan and potential? This is a fertile environment for both BPM and BI. Because as resources are stretched, you become much more reliant on your existing processes, and your ability to process information quickly to make the best decision at the time.

So more and more our customers are asking us to help get them set up in an environment that allows them to hit the ground running in an often chaotic environment. Our ability to recommend partners like Savvion allows us to ensure they not only get their information needs met, but that they can imbed this information into their key processes and make use of the information far sooner than on its own.

SC: What direction do you see customers going with respect to standardizing their BI infrastructures, adapting culture to all that new intelligence, and how they manage or improve process given all this information? What are some of the trends you see in how your best customers manage intelligence and process more effectively?

GW: The cultural aspect of this issue is really interesting. Like any new technology, it's an issue of getting comfortable with it and then driving adoption. I had a friend awhile back who still wouldn't use the ATM for depositing checks—and now he does all his banking on-line! The intersection of BI and BPM reminds me of that example. The trend is clearly moving toward working across teams, across departments, with an emphasis on making fast decisions to take advantage of the small window of opportunity that you normally get in the business world today. And BI and BPM are positioned really well to satisfy this emerging market requirement.

And as companies look to fewer vendors from which to get this information, it's imperative that they work with vendors like Savvion and Business Objects who a) know their business and processes, and b) they trust to give them the information they need to win in the marketplace. Business intelligence and business process management software are certainly two areas that provide solutions to these and other important business challenges.

SC: Thank you so much for your time this month, Guy. We see lots of interest around marrying BPM with BI and this has really helped showcase the value and what to look for.

GW: You're welcome!

Learn more about how Savvion BPM makes BI actionable here.
Learn more about Business Objects and Operational BI here.
Learn more about Guy Weismantel here.