Vendors & Tools

In the 6 years I am running Mirror42, many people have asked me to explain the difference between performance management (PM) and business intelligence (BI). All BI And PM vendors talk about Dashboards, Analytics, KPIs, Reporting and yet there seem to be big differences between the different products and solutions.

In the last decade Business Intelligence vendors ran a feature race. Their focus was not how to best visualize your business data, but how to deliver the most sexy BI sales demo.
We have all seen examples of this type of ‘sales functionality’: Interactive gauges where the needles moves if you select a month, 3d stacked bars with multiple metrics in one graph, 3D pie charts with more then 6 colors and 4 area’s that are more or less the same size, dashboards where all data is updated when you move your mouse on the screen. Great for marketing, but useless when trying to manage a business.

An important measure of the success of an IT strategy and architecture is its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. • CIOs are faced with long investment cycles, while technology lifecycles are only getting shorter. IT needs to be ready...

When it comes to advice about choosing Balanced Scorecard software, most writers and practitioners tend to focus their examination on an organization’s perceived technical requirements, spending pages outlining what the prudent investor should look for in the way of analytics, compatibility with other systems, drill-down capabilities, and dozens of other intricate considerations. No one will dispute the importance of a robust technical environment, and, in fact many software vendors rely almost exclusively on their product’s technological functionality to win over new clients. But is a technologically advanced solution really what you need from a Scorecard software solution?

"Infrastructure is everything below the level I care about". For developers that would consist of the network and the hardware, for the CEO of the company, probably all of IT would fit under that definition. And given the fact that...