The document discusses six areas that organizations need to focus on: compliance management, profitability management, process improvement, cost management, performance improvement, and business innovation. It recommends that organizations assess their existing processes, leverage current investments in systems like ERP and CRM, and integrate data to gain insights for performance management in order to address these challenges and gain a competitive advantage. Performance management requires aligning information, systems, strategy, planning and execution across the enterprise.

2. Compliance Management. Regulatory compliance
brings new pressure to find better methods to
assess policies and processes from finance to
operations. Compliance assessment requires
systems that automate the manual reviews and
analysis and are proactive in monitoring business
activities and processes to reduce audit costs.
Efficient links between people and processes need
to be adopted in the enterprise for compliance, new
information technology and systems.

3. Profitability Management. The push for managing costs and optimizing
revenue streams is sharpening the focus on profitability across the
enterprise. The influence of finance beyond the budgeting process is
creating new rigor in different forms of profitability, including customers,
products, operations and financials. Organizations need to build a BI
foundation to support applications and systems for profitability
management. Process Improvement. Despite the increased buzz around
business process management, organizations need to focus on assessing
and improving their existing operational processes before automating and
controlling them with new ERP or CRM systems. Most organizations and IT
suppliers have failed to take this easier path to process improvement.
Measuring, monitoring and improving processes is not as easy as it seems,
but it is essential for enabling performance management.

4. Cost Management. Avoiding and reducing costs to meet the
corporate and financial requirements of your organization
should be part of your standard operational processes.
Business must streamline operational processes for efficiency
improvement and IT must continue portfolio and vendor
consolidation to meet cost management objectives.
Leveraging existing investments in CRM and ERP and
accessing and integrating data assets into timely, relevant
and contextual information is critical for enabling performance
management.

5. Performance Improvement. The underlying theme of
performance management is improving business results, and,
while it seems obvious, management has not adopted the
performance management process as part of their daily
operations. Assessing and refining processes to the next level
of efficiency and effectiveness requires a much closer
alignment of information and systems. Lack of support for
linking strategy, planning, and execution in most
organizations is still a major barrier to realizing optimal
performance improvements.

6. Business Innovation. Transforming or applying innovative
processes and methods to gain a competitive advantage
should be a top priority. Unfortunately, the assets and ideas in
organizations aren't fully leveraged to improve the value of the
organization. Organizing a process to take advantage of
information technology and systems for business innovation
should be part of every organization. One of the largest
unrealized opportunities in organizations today is fully
leveraging ideas and knowledge to transform business
processes into continuing innovation.

7. Assessment. Investing in BI is an important step toward
improving information visibility and ultimately performance, but
is only one piece of the larger performance management
program that organizations need to undertake to achieve
superior business results. The six business imperatives
outlined here drive the need for rigorous performance
management processes. How organizations apply
performance management to their business will determine
their competitive advantage. Ventana Research recommends
that organizations that want to address these challenges
leverage existing investments while examining new ones to
bring innovation and performance improvement to the
enterprise.