I have written before about enterprise risk management, which is an essential piece of both performance management and corporate governance. Every aspect of business entails risk. Everyone who makes a business decision is – whether consciously or not – making trade-offs between risk and reward. Assessing risk is tricky in business because it means different things to different people depending on where they work and their specific role in an organization. From a broad view, risk management becomes an “enterprise” issue for three reasons. One is to ensure that risk management is harmonized across the company and consistent with the corporation’s risk tolerance. A second purpose is to manage cross-functional risks – things that happen in one part of the company can have negative impacts on other areas. The third is to address the risk elements of what’s called the agency dilemma.
Enterprise Risk Management Addresses the Agency Dilemma
Topics: Governance, GRC, Office of Finance, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, compliance
Jaspersoft Releases Version 4 and Tackles Large-Scale Data
Open source business intelligence (BI) software vendor Jaspersoft recently announced general availability of its flagship product Jaspersoft 4 and earlier this week announced a new reporting project that provides data connectors to a variety of large-scale data sources.
Topics: Data Warehousing, IT Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management
Secrets Revealed in Massively Parallel Processing and Database Technology
This is the first in a series of posts on the architectures of analytic databases. This is relational database technology that has been “supercharged” in some way to handle large amounts of data such as typical data warehouse workloads. The series will examine massively parallel processing (MPP), columnar databases, appliances and in-database analytics. Our purpose is to help those evaluating analytic database technologies understand some of the alternative approaches so they can differentiate between different vendors’ offerings. There is no single best solution for all analytics for all types of applications; usually the decision involves a series of trade-offs. Understanding what you might be giving up or gaining, you may be able to make a better decision about which solution is best for your organization’s needs.
Topics: Data Warehousing, RDBMS, IT Performance, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management
Social media, the newest channel of communication across the Internet, is increasingly being used to influence, but also to deliver advice and research. I wrote about this revolution last year (See: “The Social Media Revolution in Industry Analyst Community”), reporting on the transformation that is underway and the work of our firm along with Altimeter Group and dozens of other active industry analysts. While some industry analysts are aggressively engaged in social media, using Twitter and producing blogs, there are many more who apparently do not see any value in the time and energy it takes to engage these new channels. Although the larger IT analyst firms – Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – have provided channels for their analysts to blog, only a small percentage of analysts at these firms actually use them. It is useful that IDC, Forrester, and Gartner have provided a library of their analysts on Twitter that includes their handles, as a review shows that their analysts appear to have viewed the channel as a novelty, giving it a shot in 2009 but doing little since. At least the Forrester listing groups its analysts into research areas; other firms apparently expect you to figure out the focus of their analysts on your own. These are good first steps, but they still don’t make it easy for those who wish to follow them on these channels; they still leave it to you, the reader, to make sense of the different social media identities of their analysts, to figure a Twitter handle from the blog post and visa versa.
Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Market Research, IT Performance, IT Research, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications, Information Management, Information Technology, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Industry Analyst
Is the World Ready for One Source of Customer Data?
If you listen to salesforce.com (SFDC) then you’d have to believe the answer is an emphatic “Yes.”
Topics: Salesforce.com, Customer Experience, Customer Information Management, Operational Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Information Management, Call Center, CRM
I recently commented on why I believe companies must manage taxes more intelligently. One dimension of this is optimizing tax risk exposure. Most corporate tax codes are notoriously complex and at times ambiguous, leaving room for companies to interpret their application. These interpretations fall on a scale of “conservative” to “aggressive,” in which companies weigh the risk of penalties and other negative outcomes against that of paying more taxes than necessary. It strikes me that few of the companies that should be paying attention to these sorts of trade-offs are doing so. I suspect there are a couple of important reasons.
Topics: Tax, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, Financial Performance Management
The new year started off with a bang in the human capital management software market as SumTotal Systems acquired GeoLearning, a leading learning management system (LMS) software vendor.
Topics: Learning, Performance, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Compensation, SumTotal Systems, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics
Cloud computing is having an increasingly large influence over the IT landscape. It’s likely that, whether you realize it or not, corporate data exists has and or is migrating outside the walls of your organization. Recent research by Ventana Research shows that in areas such as customer services, sales, workforce or human capital management, software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based applications increasingly are being accepted and adopted. In our benchmark research on business intelligence and performance management, for example, only 53 percent of prefer their systems on-premises, and we expect that percentage to decline in the next 12 to 24 months, in which more than one-third of organizations plan to begin using cloud-based or SaaS applications.
Topics: Sales Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Data Integration, Information Management, Workforce Performance
