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How To Turn Your Online Bill Pay Expense into a Revenue Stream [NACHA Payments]

[This is just one of my series of posts from the NACHA Payments 2008 conference in Las Vegas.]

How To Turn Your Online Bill Pay Expense into a Revenue Stream [NACHA Payments]

Peter Gordon
Partner, eCom Advisors

Synopsis from Conference Program

For a decade, banks' rapidly increasing expenditures on EBP have been justified on concepts like stickiness, consumer retention, consumer satisfaction, increased balances and product cross-selling. Although these concepts are attractive, most banks are not able to measure the ROI of EBP. As a result, banks cannot directly associate incremental revenue to their EBP expense. This session demonstrates how banks can monetize their EBP expenditure and data. Topics addressed include: monetization strategies; how to use bill pay cross-sell/up-sell; identifying unusual behavior for retention; identifying characteristics of "best customers" that can be utilized to acquire similar customers in the online channel; and identifying behaviors that can be utilized to reduce fraud.

My Observations & Comments

Long time readers of this blog know I am a proponent of competing on analytics (see posts here and here). I was particularly interested in this session by eCom Advisors' Peter Gordon on how banks can leverage their consumer bill pay data. Bankers, pay attention because this is good stuff:

The Bill Pay Challenge

Consumer bill pay is typically a free service offered by banks in the hope of retaining customers and cross selling. Its matured from a competitive advantage to table stakes. Banks must continually upgrade their bill pay services to meet customer expectations, but what is the ROI from this investment?

Tapping into consumer bill pay data enables banks to monetize their bill pay investment and drive further returns through more effective marketing, enhanced risk management, informed strategic investments, and fraud mitigation.

Bill pay data contains three valuable elements: 1) Who your customers pay, 2) how much they spend, and 3) the frequency and timing of the spend.

4 Ways to Unlock the Value of Bill Pay Data

1. Strategic Marketing - Marketing departments at banks typically buy data about thiner customers. yet through bill pay transactions, banks can determine which of their customers have accounts at other institutions as well as the type of products they have (mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, etc.). This data can be used to develop targeted cross sell offers delivered via the online channel or other means.

2. Risk Management - Almost all banks are utilizing the same credit bureau data to evaluate the creditworthiness of their customers. But as many as 25% of US adults of little or no credit data on file (they are young, they rent rather than own, etc. Banks can use consumers bill pay data to develop alternate scoring models based on the timeliness of their rent payments and other factors and meet the as yet untapped need of undeserved customers with little or no credit history.

3. Investment - Economic data is typically published at least a month after the fact, and often amended later. GDP is published with a two month lag. Yet savvy bankers have learned to analyze their consumer bill pay data in real time in order to inform trading decisions for their own investment portfolio and won big (example: top 5 bank earned $200 million on a bill pay informed trade). In addition, banks may choose to sell their data. Aggregated anonymous data (e.g. real time spending habits by industry or consumer segment) is of significant value to marketers, economists, and investors.

4. Fraud Mitigation - Finally, many banks utilize outside sources for fraud monitoring. By using bill payment data banks can develop models to alert when new, potentially fraudulent payees are created or when unusual transaction patterns occur. If the bank's fraud department is currently buying data from fraud monitoring vendors it may be possible to sell the vendor its own data in order to reduce the cost of early warning system/negative files.

Q&A and Tips

If your bank utilizes CheckFree for its bill payment services, it is possible to get a file (on a weekly or monthly basis) of your transactional data.

Banks have disparate data sources across the institution. They key to success (and challenge) is to maintain one master customer record.

This is not rocket science - but banks should take an iterative approach and learn as they go through pilots and continuous improvement.

A data warehouse is not necessary. Banks can get started right away using a simple data base tool such as Access.

>> Return to index of my posts from NACHA Payments 2008

Unlocking the Value of Your Customer Data (TAWPI Conference)

[I am in Las Vegas for the TAWPI Payments in Transition conference – these are my notes from one of the sessions. An index of all of the sessions and links to the rest of my notes is here. - EMc]

Keynote: Unlocking the Value of Your Customer Data
Malcolm Netburn, Chairman and CEO of CDS Global

[program blurb] This keynote general session will show how billers can reposition the lockbox to capture more client data to see a 360-degree view of their customers. Having a consolidated view of customer relationships helps to better understand a customer’s buying habits and tendencies, and allows organizations to create greater brand value and generate new revenue opportunities. This data can also trickle up through an organization, feeding specialized, departmental information management systems – helping organizations become more predictive, intuitive and proactive about their customers.  Perhaps most importantly, billers are able to make sound, confident marketing decisions, knowing that your data is fresh and accurate. 
[presentation]

My notes/observations:

I have been looking forward to this particular presentation as it is the most relevant to my B2B focus and efforts to help companies leverage their transactional data to drive better decision making company-wide. As the speaker's business is concentrated on magazines (a subsidiary of Hearst) most of the comments are geared toward consumer customers. But there are still implications for B2B.

Success for most organizations is driven by the quality of their customer relationships, in a multi-channel, complex environment. Customer information is key to driving marketing efforts, influencing strategic decisions, and determining success and failure of individual projects/products/acquisitions/initiatives.

Yet most organizations are not able to effectively collect and take advantage of the data available to them. Challenges include:

• departmentalized, silo'd information management systems
• paper and electronic data inputs in parallel, inconsistent processes
• global, multi-channel commerce
• various payment types
• various methods of exchanging media (data)

Diversity of channels, payment methods, interactions are necessary to satisfy customers. But there is tension between ever increasing diversity and the need for cohesive data to make more effective decisions

Manual processing is not only inefficient, but leads to poor customer service. Information is cluttered, scattered, incomplete, often unused, or lost entirely.

Richer customer information, and more comprehensive understanding of needs, leads to more profitable relationship.

Solution: capture more complete data as processing (paper documents and electronic transactions). Why?

• more accuracy
• faster
• 360 degree view of customer
• higher availability and usability of information
• drives enterprise systems
• enables proactive customer service (at all touch points, departments across company)

AIIM Survey reveals undervalued opportunities (slide 6). Efficiency and productivity consistently ranks high, yet what about leadership/competitive advantage and enhancing profitability? These are undervalued as rationales for implementing scanning and capture technologies yet they have the most strategic impact.

Hierarchy of customer data collection, deployment, and use:

Traditional

• Orders/Invoice processing
• Remittance
• Customer database

Most companies are capturing valuable data during the order process: customer and transaction level. But what can be done with this information? Personalize communications and measure effectiveness, develop tailored offers/programs/features, understand purchasing habits/patterns, and make better corporate decisions to enhance marketing, build new revenue streams (new ways to add value), and identify cost saving opportunities.

Advanced

• Analytical databases
• Web traffic (and implications)
• Customer service

Ever increasing utilization of the web and proactive - rather than responsive - customer service. Analytical databases include data sources that are both traditional (orders, remittance) and nontraditional (e.g, surveys, partners, demographic data, web traffic, data gleaned from customer service preferences/patterns )and significantly drive better decision making and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Web traffic (navigation choices) reveals interests, preferences, and shopping/buying habits of of consumers and B2B customers as they visit your site.  Utilize advanced level data to further customize customer contact and promotions/offers, cross channel identification of customer needs, partnership and promotional opportunities.

Innovative

• Social networking
• Interactive communication
• Emerging channels (e.g. mobile)

Social networking is not just about MySpace and Facebook. Does your company have a blog? A wiki? Discussion board/forum? Do you communicate with customers via text message? Instant message? Do you have an interactive, two-way relationship with your customers? How can you offer information, tools, products and services to your customers via these new channels? Interactive communication offers insight, new customers (thru social networking exposure to your customers network), an opportunity to strengthen brand and tap into new generation of customers. New channels allow enhanced integration and synchronization of applications and data.

Examples of how CDS Global is unlocking value embedded in documents

Detect handwriting on document (see examples below)

Classification Keying to drive business rules/workflow. Eliminates manual sorting and maintains accurate and consistent application of business rules. (see example below)

Recommendation Systems

Based on analytic data, prompt customer service reps to make tailored offers (up-sell and cross-sell). Generates scripts on the fly, based on how the conversation progresses. Also utilized for outbound email and web-store interactions. For example, use email confirmation of order to up-sell/cross-sell.

Visually depict metrics (e.g. why offer accepted?) via dashboards in real time, informing decision making at all levels of the organization. (see example below)

Print on demand application that creates customized collateral/reports for individual customers based on variable data collected in database. Particularly useful for Financial Institutions developing material for risk management, asset allocation, etc. Customer perceives that great effort was made to customize information just for them. Deliver as either PDF over web or printed in color and delivered via mail (allow customer to choose).

The Future

• Increasing complexity
• Traditional (non-marketing driven) companies will become more marketing focused as services become increasingly commoditized.
• Shift from "document management" to "customer information management"

>> Return to index of TAWPI conference sessions

Best Practices for Technology Leaders: Leading Change

Last week I posted about how CFOs need to be more strategic and lead change, now I am following up with this tidbit from Frank Buytendijk's business intelligence blog on CIOs as change agents:

It is the current best practice to define the role of the CIO as a change agent within the organisation. He/she needs to help the organisation to use information, particularly performance information, to gain competitive advantage by leveraging the information asset to improve decision making at all levels in the organisation, from the strategic level right down to all operational levels of the organisation. This is partly about technology, but much more about organisational change -- about governance and about enabling new business models.

Traditionally, a CTO's focus is much more narrow, and focused exclusively on technology. How do I optimise the technology we own? How do I drive cost out of our technology platform? What hardware and networks do we have? Who should be our strategic suppliers of technology? How do I improve the reliability of our technology?

Read more:

CIO or CTO
Frank Buytendijk Blog

Democratization of the Dashboard: Free Up Working Capital by Bringing BI to Receivables

Information for everyone!

The latest Treasury & Risk explores how mid-level managers are enjoying the drill down capabilities and real time metrics reporting of business intelligence dashboards. A case study featuring Dow Corning demonstrates how dashboards support a company wide dispute management system, providing dispute coordinators and managers in sales, customer service, credit and collections with a consolidated data source. When a payment doesn't match the corresponding invoice a dispute is logged, generating an automatic email to the appropriate dispute coordinator with a link to the dashboard for research.

Dow Corning's Success Metrics

• 18% drop in the total number of disputes
• 10 day reduction in the average cycle time for issues to be resolved
• 50% reduction in the amount of working capital tied up in payment disputes

We can count on broader use of business intelligence tools  in finance as a result of the big ERP vendors recent acquisitions (Oracle + Hyperion and SAP + Business Objects & OutlookSoft). Perhaps the day will finally come when all of a businesses transaction data can truly drive better decision making. In the meantime, there are plenty of data integrity (incongruent data definitions) and systems challenges (multiple ERP instances, often from various vendors) to overcome.

Read more:

Dashboards for Everyone
Treasury & Risk
March 2008 (pages 24-25)

IBM + Cognos

Consolidation of the business intelligence industry continues as IBM makes a $4.9 offer for Cognos, a 9.5% premium over Friday's closing price. IBM has had a long standing partnership with Cognos. This is the third major acquisition this year: one month ago SAP offered $6.8 billion for Business Objects and in March Oracle bought Hyperion for $3.3 billion.

Coverage here:

• New York Times
• Wall Street Journal
• Bloomberg

BI News: SAP Acquires Business Objects

SAP is buying Business Objects for 4.8 billion euros ($6.8 billion) in a departure from its organic growth strategy. Up until now, SAP's largest acquisition was OutlookSoft earlier this year. Listen to the press conference tomorrow or listen to the replay. According to Business Object's Timo Elliott the plan is that CEO John Schwartz will run Business Objects as a "stand alone" entity, with OutlookSoft and Pilot rolled in. Time will tell...

Learn more:

• Press Release
• Bloomberg
• Reuters
• Business Objects

Taking responsibility for the success of an IT initiative

Check out this exchange of posts between Frank Buytendijk (Oracle/Hyperion) and Tom Hudock (Online Business Systems) about the role of business in IT initiatives (they are particularly concerned with business intelligence but the sentiment holds true for all technology projects).

Frank and Tom are dismayed that business leaders have taken a hands-off role in key technology projects allowing their IT colleagues to write business cases, develop project time lines and budgets, and define deliverables. Obviously, our IT colleagues bring considerable talent and resources to every project. Yet it is the business stakeholders that will USE the system when it is complete and it is the business that is relying on the system to make better decisions and improve company performance. Therefore the business must take the lead in determining project objectives and success criteria, defining requirements, and remain active and engaged throughout the project life cycle. Otherwise how will the end result fulfill the business' needs?

As I've emphasized many times in this blog and in my articles, systems projects are doomed to fail when business stakeholders fail to take an active role. Learn more about how you can prevent YOUR key projects from going off-track:

Unclear Project Objectives
Insufficient User Input
Value Requirements (and Scope Creep)
Lacking Senior Leadership Support

SAP Acquires OutlookSoft

The ERP + Performance Management challenge heats up as SAP acquires OutlookSoft in order to compete with Oracle (and it's recent acquisition, Hyperion)
 
Read more:

SAP/OutlookSoft press release
Article at CFO.com

Businss Intelligence: 5 [mis]Assumptions that Lead to Failure

If you are contemplating a Business Intelligence initiative (or in the midst of one) I strongly encourage you to read this post by Timo Elliott at the BI Questions Blog. He lists five fatal assumptions about BI and offers insight on how to avoid failure:

1. BI isn't about technology, it's about people.
2. BI is a process, not a one-off project
3. BI isn't about cost, it's about value
4. BI isn't about data, it's about insight
5. BI isn't about perfect planning, it's about being pragmatic.

If you are  a regular reader of ForteBlog some of the advice will seem familiar: foremost, technology is about people and adding value, and that BI is a long term process not a one-off project.

The Five Fatal Flaws of BI (via BI for Business People)

"Dirty Data" adds costs and hampers decision making

Over at the EyeOnBI blog Mike Leano summarizes a recent Gartner presentation on the cost of "dirty data" - data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicated. Gartner estimates that more than 25% of the data within Fortune 1000 companies is flawed, and will continue to be flawed for the foreseeable future at most companies. Gartner observes that bad data isn't just an IT problem, and suggests that companies need to appoint 'data stewards' within business groups that are responsible for the quality of information.

You've got to have clean data if you are going to successfully compete on analytics. Speaking of competing on analytics - Tom Davenport's book by that name was recently published (expanding on his HBR article mentioned in my previous post) and arrived from Amazon this week. I'll be reading it soon and share my thoughts in an upcoming post.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Harvard Business School Press
March 2007

Bureaucracy is bringing down GAP Inc

According to the WSJ, interim CEO Robert Fisher at the Gap, Inc. is counting on faster decision making and less bureaucracy to turn around the struggling clothing retailer.  Fisher hopes to combat high turnover in critical leadership roles by attracting and retaining creative talent. The company has become paralyzed by analysis and overly reliant on customer research and focus groups as it struggles to become competitive again. Gap has tried to be everything to everyone, offering a broad range of merchandise to its aging long-term customers (including yours truly) as well as the youth market. Meanwhile, its rivals have focused on the trendy youth market and Gap's sales have tumbled.

One wonders if Gap leadership has been paying too much attention to the style trends and too little attention to their financial trendline. Quick decisions are only as good as they data on which they are based. In times of crisis, reliable information is crucial for making difficult decisions. It's unclear how the Gap will streamline their decision making and whether or not they've got management reporting in place that answers the key strategic questions to navigate through their troubles: which market niche to serve, which merchandise to offer, which stores to close, where to cut costs. They may not have had the right information up until now, but Fisher has pulled together key data and made some tough decisions already. Namely closing the newly launched Forth and Towne brand before it had a chance to get off the ground so that Gap can focus on its core businesses: Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic.

Fisher and the incoming talent at Gap, Inc. have a tough road ahead. They will need to rethink their business over-all and realign their workforce. Decisions made over the coming months will make or break the future of the company - let's hope they can count on the data and reporting tools at their disposal.

Gap Aims to Unleash Creativity for Revival
The Wall Street Journal
Amy Merrick
March 6, 2007, pg B2

Strategic Business Intelligence

A recent article in CFO.com explores the benefits -- and challenges -- of implementing Business Intelligence (BI) capability company wide. Traditionally BI tools were deployed within silos and limited to tactical usage. Now BI is getting more strategic.

Features of Strategic Business Intelligence

• Cross-function, department, and organization (vs. single function, siloed solution)
• Wide end-user usage: hundreds, if not thousands of users (vs. a small number of tech savvy power users)
• Active, driven by exceptions and rules (vs. passive, driven by reports)
• Web deployment via portals and with wireless support (vs. client/server deployment)
• Forcasting capabilities vs. historical analysis
• Solution orientation vs. product/tool-centric

Source: Butler Group, via CFO.com

The good news is some of the barriers to preventing enterprise-wide strategic BI are falling fast. Notably, the technology has improved in leaps and bounds. Over the past couple of years, innovation and heavy investment by both large and small vendors — not to mention plenty of end-user customization — have brought a host of BI tools capable of extracting and integrating data from all sorts of sources and turning it into operational intelligence on which to base forward-looking strategy. "Today's business intelligence should be able to direct you in terms of what sales you should do next — predictive modeling, sales pipelining, forecasting what market segments have the highest propensity to buy a service," says Andreas Bitterer, a Hamburg-based analyst at Gartner, a market research company.

Source: CFO.com

Connecting the Dots
Janet Kersnar, CFO Europe
June 12, 2006

Aligning Compensation to Drive Performance

Lauralee Martin, CFO of Jones Lang LaSalle spoke at CFO Magazine's Corporate Performance Management conference in Chicago today. She shared how her company has developed a compensation program that drives performance across a wide spectrum of real estate and money management functions.

The key to Jones Lang LaSalle's success is a balanced approach, simultaneously addressing the needs of all three critical constituencies:

Jones Lang LaSalle is a global professional services firm competing against investment managers, real estate management firms. Their employees have chosen Jones Lang LaSalle over other more entrepreneurial asset management firms, yet they must be paid a competitive wage + bonus in order to stay. In order to balance employee incentives with long term performance Jones Lang LaSalle ties compensation to the business's 5 year strategic plan. As annuity margins increased (per the strategic plan) employees received a greater share of incentive fees. However, the incentives were a mix of short term and long term rewards in order to retain high performers.

Another key to Jones Lang LaSalle's success was to create bonus pools. As employees reach sales targets their bonus funds a group pool. However, if other performance metrics (teamwork, customer satisfaction) are not met the employee may not receive all of their bonus despite having met revenue targets. This ensures that the company's values are fostered.

Key Take Aways

1. One approach will not fit all - compensation plans must adapt for different functions as well as varying levels of seniority.
2. Employees must always know exactly what they are responsible for and how they are expected to perform.
3. Long term plans are critical to sustained performance.
4. Compensation does drive behavior - so be careful which performance metrics are tied to compensation.

This has been a dispatch from CFO Magazine's CPM Conference in Chicago
Other posts in this series:

• Corporate Performance Management
• Wal-Mart & Sustainability
• Competing on Analytics Redux
• CPM Case Study: Corning

CPM Case Study: Corning

Jim Flaws, CFO of Corning spoke at CFO Magazine's Corporate Performance Management conference today. He presented lessons learned as his company rode the wild wave of telecom enthusiasm and bust.

In 1996 Corning spun off its healthcare and consumer products division (50% of sales) in order to focus on communications and display technologies. This proved to be a risky gamble. As telecom rapidly expanded in the late 1990s Corning's sales of fibre optic cable and stock performance soared. Then the telecom industry imploded and most of the cable capacity that was built was never used, resulting in a 75% price reduction of Corning's key product. Flaws observed that kite string became more expensive than fibre optic cable! Needless to say, Corning's stock tumbled. The company was bleeding cash and debt repayments were looming.

Under new management (actually the old CEO returned) Corning turned itself around by focusing on three key priorities:

1. Restoring Financial Health - Corning maintained a billion in cash and increased their lines of credit while simultaneously driving down costs (see Return to Profitability, below). They sold smaller, well performing, businesses in order to pay down debt. The key to their financial transformation was open, on-going dialog with their bankers, the rating agencies, and financial markets.
   
   
2. Returning to Profitability - Corning reduced its workforce by more than 50%, froze salaries, and close 4 out of 5 optical fibre plants in order to reduce fixed costs. They slashed costs on all but the most essential activities and introduced 6 Sigma performance improvement programs.
   
   
3. Investing in the Future - Corning continued to invest in R&D in three strategic areas: large sized LCD displays, diesel environmental control technologies, and fibre designed especially for the last few meters connecting households with digital networks.

Some highlights from Jim Flaw's remarks:

• Scenario planning is key "imagine the unimaginable"
• At Corning, the Treasury department takes a proactive stance evaluating the financial viability of its customers' business models. If the buyers seem to be on shaky ground, then Corning needs to rethink its projections.
• Beware of hedging. Although it is prudent to hedge risks in order to prevent disaster, Jim Flaws believes it is the CFOs role to ensure that the company does not become too conservative.
• CFOs must play a "devil's advocate" role and ask challenging questions about potential investments.
• Continued R&D investment is critical to position the company for future growth in emerging markets.
• Integrity is key: Corning had to prove to its shareholders, Wall Street, bankers, and ratings agencies that it would follow through on its plan to restore the company's finances. With each step forward they gained the trust and confidence of their investors.

This has been a dispatch from CFO Magazine's CPM Conference in Chicago
Other posts in this series:

• Corporate Performance Management
• Wal-Mart & Sustainability
• Competing on Analytics Redux
• Aligning Compensation to Drive Performance

Competing on Analytics Redux

Tom Davenport, author of the article Competing on Analystics that I wrote about in a previous post, spoke this morning at CFO Magazine's CPM conference. He observed that the planets are aligned for business analytics: companies are growing again and emphasizing innovation, technologies are more mature and less expensive, enough transacition data has ammased in ERPs and other systems to support robust analysis, and companies are recruiting personnel with analytic prowess.

His remarks closely followed his HBR article:

"Competing on Analytics"
by Thomas H Davenport
Harvard Business Review, January 2006
Reprint #R0601H
Available (for purchase) from HBR's website.

This has been a dispatch from CFO Magazine's CPM Conference in Chicago
Other posts in this series:

• Corporate Performance Management
• Wal-Mart & Sustainability
• CPM Case Study: Corning
• Aligning Compensation to Drive Performance

Wal-Mart & Sustainability

David Blackwell, Wal-Mart's VP for Global Procurement spoke today at CFO Magazine's CPM Conference. I was very impressed. I admit, I've been a critic of Wal-Mart for some time (labor practices, strong-arming suppliers, etc.) but this was a real eye-opener. Unbeknownst to me Wal-Mart has had a sustainability program for the last few years and has reached out to NGOs, governments, academics, and environmental thought leaders. Blackwell described sustainability as "the greatest drive for innovation at Wal-Mart in the last 20 years." The numbers that Blackwell quoted in terms of bottom line savings, efficiency, and increased sales were very impressive.

I shouldn't have been surprised, given the resources and expertise at Wal-Mart. And upon further reflection, the sustainability theme is consistent with my other recent impressions of Wal-Mart. A couple weeks ago I listened to this podcast from Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series that demonstrates the phenomenal impact Wal-Mart had on a start up that sells environmentally-friendly, sustainable pesticides. And Wal-Mart's interest in organic produce is having a huge impact on that industry, as I read here and as noted by the editorial staff of the NYTimes here. The Wal-Mart  PR machine is very effective and all of their messages are on target.

This has been a dispatch from CFO Magazine's CPM Conference in Chicago
Other posts in this series:

• Corporate Performance Management
• Competing on Analytics Redux
• CPM Case Study: Corning
• Aligning Compensation to Drive Performance

Addendum:  An additional NYTimes article examining the impact of Wal-Mart on the organic industry was published on June 4th. Details as follows:

Mass Natural
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 6-4-06
The New York Times Magazine
June 4, 2006, Sunday
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Corporate Performance Management

I'm in Chicago for CFO Magazine's Corporate Performance Management conference. This is the first of a series of posts summarizing key observations and findings from the conference.

CPM Defined

Whether you call it CPM, BPM (business performance management) or EPM (enterprise performance management) the concept is the same:  performance management is a blend of processes and technologies that enable organizations to define, measure, and track performance against both operational and financial goals. Key CPM components are planning, data consolidation and reporting, modeling, analysis, and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs).

Key Players

There are a number of CPM vendors, and the industry has been consolidating. Business Finance Magazine published a CPM buyers guide in its January 2006 issue. Here are the big players:

Business Objects
Cognos
Geac
Hyperion
OutlookSoft
SAS

What drives CPM?

External factors include investors, regulations, and market demands for performance. Yet many businesses are motivated by internal factors such as the complexity of their internal technology systems, multiple data sources, fewer and fewer analytic and technology resources, and ever greater demands for analytics. There are powerful stakeholders - boards, senior management, regulators - with high expectations.

CPM Underperforms Thus Far

Many presenters at the conference openly admit that CPM has not lived up to its potential. The technology is still maturing and implementation can be very challenging. The over all message at the conference was that leadership and attention to business strategy is critical for success -- the technology is only one part of the equation.

Other posts in this series:

• Wal-Mart & Sustainability
• Competing on Analytics Redux
• CPM Case Study: Corning
• Aligning Compensation to Drive Performance

(more to come)