I recently read an article on entrepreneurship that featured Richard Branson. In the article, Branson was quoted as saying that the “real opportunity in business is the ability to identify the frustrations in a particular area and have real solutions to remedy those frustrations.”
That started me thinking about the common frustrations that I have seen while working in the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) industry for the last 15 years. Here are seven common frustrations that I see frequently along with some recommended solutions.
(This is the first of 7 articles discussing frustrations with the EPM industry. To be sure you don’t miss out on any articles of interest, please sign up for our weekly newsletter at http://www.epmchannel.com/register-for-our-weekly-digests/.)
#1: The constant vying for EPM ownership between the Business and IT.
One common re-occurring question across many organizations is “who should manage the EPM systems, Finance or IT?” My belief is that neither of the organizations is individually fully qualified for the task. Each side needs to realize that it is in their best interest to work closely with the other. That mutual realization will hopefully lead to collaborative efforts such as a Center of Excellence (COE) or some other team effort to support and evolve the EPM systems that the senior leadership team has entrusted both organizations with managing.
IT – Here are some things you should think about…
EPM applications are continually evolving to adapt to changes in the business. The traditional strategy for IT support is to put the application into production and throw away the key until the next phase of the project can be funded. Finance has often responded to this by leveraging IT to provide the data and leveraging Excel or some legacy departmental point solution to perform a lot of their EPM tasks like planning and modeling. Finance likes what they have because they have control, but they don’t have the staff anymore to keep going down this route. Finance lives in a world of continuous change since they man the Financial GPS system that the senior leadership team uses to plot the future course for the corporation. IT needs to find ways to inject flexibility into their EPM support model to help finance absorb this change.
IT, does your staff have trusted access to first-hand knowledge of the business needs that is required to design and support your company’s EPM platform? In your job, an important skill is to extrapolate what you know from experience and apply it to new technologies and business functions. In many organizations, the rough extrapolation of ERP, relational database knowledge, and reporting technologies to EPM without real world experience and advice often leaves the Finance guys on the other side of the conversation with the impression that “You just don’t get it.”
If your EPM/BI team isn’t being embraced by the business then you have the wrong guys. Sure, they have a tough job and need you to back them up, but if they can’t establish a trust relationship then the lines of communication can never be put in place. Better business information starts with the ability to understand the needs of your business customers. You have to be able to ask the right questions to draw out the detail around what the business truly needs.
You live and die by predictability. You measure your success by measures like 99.95% uptime or 24/7 support. Slow and steady wins the race. At the same time, your footprint has been downsized over the last few years. Yet you still want to control all technology in your business. Why? When it comes to EPM solutions, you need to recognize the business needs will continue to evolve, you should be mentoring, supporting, and providing governance to technological innovation to support this and not stifling it.
Finance — Here are some things you should think about …
Having evolved over time, your EPM systems no longer provide the efficiencies you hoped for. You have just moved resources from maintaining monster spreadsheets to maintaining EPM applications. You still need to reconcile differences between your legal, management, and planning applications. You are still putting out almost as many fires as you did before, and you still have a lot of monster spreadsheets that only a handful of your people understand. What you really need is an architect to re-design your EPM ecosystem to get the efficiencies to allow your team to spend more time on the key deliverables that you promised to your senior leadership team.
The EPM systems and processes that you have cobbled together are a big risk to your organization. You don’t have the controls, processes, redundancies, design, etc. in place for long term sustainability. You can’t keep making changes directly in your production systems. You don’t have a backup or documentation if your [EPM systems] guy walks out the door. You need structure and a solid technical foundation. Your IT organization can help you with that.
You should be keenly aware that you don’t give your technical folks enough lead time to make the changes that you need. “I could make the changes myself in Excel in minutes”, really isn’t a valid argument. You need to plan better and recognize that investing in the proper architecture up front; will allow more flexibility in the long term. You need to be a better partner with the technical teams that support you.
Both IT and Finance …
I have been in the meetings with both of you present. I have felt the tension. I have seen the finger pointing. You both need to stop, take a deep breath and realize that each of you needs to make adjustments. YOU are half the problem. Sit down and build your roadmap for the future together.
By Paul Mack, from: http://www.clearlinegroup.com/moving-beyond-seven-common-epm-frustrations/
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