The Performance Manager: Helping to Align IT & Business

Managing Performance requires a collaboration between business decision makers and the IT departments that provide the information that drives decision-making. Whether IT is creating reports for one specific department in an organization — Marketing, Sales, Finance, Operations or others — or whether an organization is rolling out a complete BI or Performance Management strategy, the partnership between Business and IT is critical to success.

Historically, providing the right information for the right business decisions has begun with IT and the Business function sitting down with a blank sheet of paper. IT typically looks at the massive amount of data in the infrastructure as a starting point – right from multiple ERP systems through to data silo’s. The Business function typically looks at the metrics on which they are measured as a starting point.

Coming at the problem from these two perspectives usually results in many frustrating iterations before defining the business issues that require resolution and the associated information required to make decisions on those business issues.

Aligning business and IT to achieve performance management is not an easy challenge to solve. IT cannot expect the business to understand the complex infrastructure and data challenges that exists within an organization. The business cannot expect IT to understand all their business needs overnight. So how can the two work together in harmony to solve this age-old problem?

Over the past decade, Cognos has worked with thousands of customers around the globe to implement performance management initiatives and help them overcome challenges as described above. By collecting the insights from these customers, we have released the most successful concepts in the form of a new book called: "The Performance Manager, Proven Strategies for Turning Information into Higher Business".

This book outlines an integrated framework of information "sweet spots" for each business function that can be used to help IT identify and understand the business needs. It provides templates that show what information is required and who needs to see it for each major decision area in the company. In total, it offers suggestions to IT for 42 decisions areas within the business, organized by the eight major functions of a company: Finance, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, Operations, Human Resources, Information Technology, plus an overarching section for Executive Management.

"The Performance Manager" can be used in one of two ways: it can be read chapter by chapter to gain an understanding of a specific "information sweet spot" within a business function that is of interest at a critical time or it can read in its entirety to gain an understanding on how to make better performance a truly cross-organizational exercise.