EPM, Project Orion, and the Beginner’s Mind
I’ll always be thankful for my time at Salesforce both because I met so many amazing people and because I learned so much. I learned about the importance of Trust in a SaaS company (and was drilled in the mantra, “nothing is more important than the Trust of our customers.”) And I learned about shoshin, […]
Putting the A Back in FP&A with Automated, Integrated Planning
I was reading this blog post on Continuous Planning by Rob Kugel of Ventana Research the other day and it reminded me of one of my (and Rob’s) favorite sayings: We need to put the A back in FP&A This means that the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team at many companies is so busy […]
Using Time-Based Close Rates to Align Marketing Budgets with Sales Targets
This post builds on my prior post Win Rates, Close Rates, and Milestone vs. Flow Analysis. In it, I will take the ideas in that post, expand on them a bit, and then apply them to difficult problem of ensuring you have enough marketing demand generation budget to hit your sales targets. Let’s pretend it’s […]
Is IBM Getting Out of Enterprise Performance Management?
I noticed that IBM sold off several EPM products — IBM Cognos Disclosure Management (CDM), IBM Cognos Financial Statement Reporting (FSR), and IBM Clarity 7 products — to a company called Certent. This, combined with a pretty weak performance in Gartner’s recent financial and strategic CPM magic quadrants — where IBM landed as Visionary and […]
The New 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrants for Cloud Strategic CPM (SCPM) and Cloud Financial CPM (FCPM) – How to Download; A Few Thoughts
For some odd reason, I always think of this scene — The New Phone Book’s Here – from an old Steve Martin comedy whenever Gartner rolls out their new Magic Quadrants (MQ) for corporate performance management (CPM). It’s probably because all of the excitement they generate. Last year, Gartner researchers John Van Decker and Chris […]
EPM: Now More Than Ever
The theme of my presentation at past spring’s Host Analytics World was that EPM is needed in fair, foul, or uncertain weather. While EPM is used differently in fair and foul weather scenarios, it is a critical navigational instrument to help pilot the business. For example, in tougher times: You’re constantly re-forecasting You’re doing expense reduction modeling […]
The New Split CPM Magic Quadrants from Gartner
This week Gartner research vice president John Van Decker and research director Chris Iervolino took the bold move of splitting the corporate performance management (CPM), also known as enterprise performance management (EPM), magic quadrant in two. Instead of publishing a single magic quadrant (MQ) for all of CPM, they published two MQs, one for strategic CPM […]
Host Analytics World 2016 EPM Keynote Address
We’re just finishing up day 2 of a fantastic Host Analytics World 2016, with over 800 people gathered together in San Francisco to talk about enterprise performance management (EPM). Here are a few pictures to give you a feel for the event. Here’s 49ers football legend Steve Young delivering his keynote address: Here’s me delivering […]
Why, as CEO, I Love Driver-Based Planning
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it’s incredibly useful. In this post, I’ll explain why. When I talk to finance people, I tend […]
Did You Just Make a Plan or a Budget?
Congratulations! If your company is like most, you’ve recently finished a (hopefully) solid 2013 and, from an EPM perspective, completed your 2014 annual planning process. Before we get too excited, however, let’s ask one quick question: did you just make a plan or a budget? In business, we tend to use the terms “plan” and “budget” as synonyms. […]
