BI and PM Converging

Fueled by the consolidation that is going on in the industry, converging the practice of Business Intelligence and Performance Management, many have taken up their keyboards and take part in the debate about the difference between BI and PM, eager to point out that BI looks back and PM looks ahead. I believe we will be seeing a move toward BIPM (a lovely new acronym launched by Gartner) in the forseeable future.

BIPM will in my mind make for a stronger push toward managing strategy and aligning business operations but companies applying it need to be careful. Strenghtening PM with a BI solution will result in a stronger temptation to throw more history-based metrics on a scorecard, which is a recipe for trouble. Applied correctly, BI should take a subordinate role to PM and focus on finding the root causes of problems identified by the PM side of things. Like Kaplan and Norton already emphasized in their Balanced ScoreCard book from the early 90ies, companies need to take care in avoiding the "we measure what we have" approach to performance management and work toward getting a mix of metrics that truly depict the organizational intended strategy and balance them for correct use, time and perspective.