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The 'Other' BPM |
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Click here for more on the distinction between business performance management and business process management (PDF). |
Independent consultancy BPM Partners of Stamford, Conn., posted questionnaires on several vendor and magazine websites this year. The key finding: Budgeting and planning are still a company's biggest pain points, and smoothing out these processes is a typical starting point for BPM. "The budget and planning process is still broken after all these years," says John Colbert, vice president of service development at BPM Partners. "It is a huge opportunity for vendors."
Interestingly, the findings indicate that data visualization is one of the top drivers of BPM purchases. Management clearly wants facts and figures that are easy to understand via simple eye-catching graphs that update the more mundane bar and pie charts of Excel. (Gartner Inc. estimates that as many as 60% of the world's businesses still use Excel as their primary budgeting tool.)
There's little question that BPM adoption is on the rise. Surveys at Gartner's BI summits in 2006 confirmed that BPM is the highest priority for companies considering analytical applications. A BPM Partners survey found that more than 70% of 531 respondents have BPM projects under way or in the planning stage. Among higher-end midmarket companies, the percentage rose to nearly 80%. "The numbers keep trending in the right direction," Colbert says.
Of those in the BPM game, about half say they are starting new projects. One in three is expanding an existing initiative, while 13% of respondents to the BPM Partners survey say they are already replacing their supplier. "We are calling this stage 'BPM 2.0,' which involves either taking it enterprise-wide or getting more people and data involved," Colbert says.
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