Ventana Research - Beware of Performance Management Pitfalls
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Performance management is the strategy and sets of methodologies and processes that an organization uses to direct its employees, partners, suppliers and customers to achieve a common set of goals and objectives. Ventana Research believes all performance management initiatives must address an interrelated set of people, process, information and technology issues. This paper focuses on the latter two, but people and process are critically important in shaping decisions about what information is needed and the technology for managing it.
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A new survey by IAG Consulting finds that among two-thirds of companies polled, it is &quot;improbable&quot; that an IT project will be considered an overall success due to inadequately or improperly gathered business requirements.Fifty percent of these companies&#39; projects could be termed &quot;runaways,&quot; marked by at least two of these three factors: Taking more than 180 percent of estimated time to be completed, going over 160 percent of the established budget, and delivering less than 70 percent of the desired capabilities.The other 32 percent of the companies surveyed enjoy a &quot;probable&quot; chance of success for IT project, according to the study, which surveyed more than 100 midsized and Fortune 1000 companies in North America.&quot;The numbers here came back far, far bigger than we ever expected,&quot; said Keith Ellis, vice president of IAG, which is based in the U.S. and Canada. The independent company focuses on business requirements analysis.&quot;One big reason that really stands out for me is that people tend to look at requirements as a document, not as a process. If you do that, you&#39;re going to fail,&quot; Ellis said. &quot;Here&#39;s one of those cases where the means is as or more important as the end.&quot;Good requirements analysis can ensure a project&#39;s scale is minimized, but not at the expense of meeting a business&#39; needs, according to the study. Another hallmark sees changes to requirements occurring infrequently, because the proper level of consensus has already been reached.The study weighed development projects, which cost at least $250,000 and involved &quot;significant new functionality,&quot; as opposed to matters like maintenance or a rollout of new client machines. The projects consisted of either internally developed software or application implementations. Their average scope was $3 million, according to IAG.The damage was worst when non-IT business analysts were in charge of the requirements. Those projects came in at nearly double their budgets and took more than 245 percent of their allotted time, according to IAG.When IT workers managed the requirements analysis, the results were only slightly better, with budget overruns at 163 percent and time at 172 percent.The best results came when business and IT worked together on defining requirements. There, budgets ran an average of 143 percent and time, 159 percent.The study suggested many companies are working on an ad-hoc basis. More than half &quot;did not have professional, trained staff dedicated to the function of getting requirements, and the vast majority view the process of getting requirements to be inefficient,&quot; the report states.Companies should form a &quot;center of excellence&quot; for business-requirements gathering managed by both IT and business employees, the study concluded.IAG conducted the study with the help of analyst Michael O&#39;Neil and Info-Tech Research Group over the past several months, Ellis said.
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(Source: Symphoniq) Learn why traditional performance tools can't deliver the visibility and control required to manage today's complex architectures as well as requirements an optimal solution should provide.  Listen to this podcast now!
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Organizations face increasing pressures to optimize IT performance while reducing IT costs.  Until now, few organizations had tools to increase Service Level Compliance, adopt ITIL and convince C-level executives that the IT department aligns with business priorities.  Magnum Technologies' Business Service Management whitepaper explores these issues offering client-proven solutions to current problems facing IT organizations.
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(Source: Tibco)  Every day, millions of individuals within large organizations make small, yet important business decisions based on their experience and whatever information happens to be available at the time. With little time to spare, these decisions are often taken with an incomplete view of the situation, as 'good information' is all too often still difficult to find. Faced with a backlog for new enterprise reports, out-of-control 'spreadsheet marts', and a plethora of custom applications all trying to accomplish similar goals, CIOs and business managers alike need to consider a new approach.
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Ask any corporate executive the secret to success and there's a good chance you'll hear that the management team must work on the same goals using the same assumptions and facts -- with transparency to the CEO and board. Yet most companies don't work that way, setting the stage for missed opportunities, hidden problems, and political gaming that uses siloed data and its analysis as a departmental weapon rather than as an enterprise asset.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Search engine optimization vendors and other companies can help corporations and individuals monitor and manage their online reputations. But are they crossing ethical boundaries by tinkering with Web search results?
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I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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With the Facebook phenomenon continuing to capture the imagination of consumers, broadcast television networks, and a number of ISVs, SuccessFactors, a talent-management SaaS (software as a service) provider, unveiled ULTRA, the latest version of its performance and talent management suite, which now links to Facebook profiles.At the end of last year, WorkLight, a Web 2.0 software developer, launched WorkBook, the actual Facebook application that will be used by WorkLight to facilitate corporate communications and knowledge sharing in a secure environment.Last week, many television viewers watched as the ABC network partnered with Facebook in its coverage of the New Hampshire primary.Now it is SuccessFactors' turn. The company is a SaaS powerhouse in talent management, and it has more than 2 million subscribers in 156 countries.SuccessFactors is using Facebook to allow a richer employee profile that goes beyond the structured data that is typically captured in a HCM (human capital management) service, according to Jim Holinchek, a senior analyst with Gartner.Rob Bernstein, global vice president of product marketing and product management at SuccessFactors, agrees with Holinchek?s assessment. ?It also blurs the line between enterprise and consumer by linking between employee profiles and Facebook profiles,? added Bernstein.From a management perspective, the biggest change in SuccessFactors? service probably comes from ULTRA?s new integrated capabilities. No matter where in the suite an HR or department manager is working, he or she can switch to other suite components.?In the past, managers would have to switch between applicant tracking systems, learning management and performance management, for example; now ULTRA has a single footprint,? said Bernstein.The ULTRA release also includes a new drag-and-drop UI, as well as the ability for users to generate their own content such as to-do lists. It also allows HR or facilities managers to plot and move locations of employees and equipment on a floor plan.Tagging will allow users to add to their own profile, said Bernstein,. For example, if an employee speaks a foreign language, they can be tagged with that information to enhance collaboration and, ultimately, company productivity.The integration of Facebook into ULTRA is a relatively new phenomenon, said Holinchek, and while it is true that the formal organizational structure does not necessarily reflect how work gets done, Holincheck said customers and vendors are still working to understand cases where this type of integration makes sense.?Customers are trying to understand what the ROI is from the investment,? said Holinchek.The Ultra release is compatible with Flex, Flash, and AJAX.ULTRA is shipping now.
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Should businesses replace post-mortems with âpre-mortems?â Adopt âcounterintuitive management practices?â And more...
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Analysis Over the past few years, CRM implementations have come in for much criticism, especially in the elusive area of ROI. This has caused many companies to re-evaluate their technology implementations
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Andy Beal looks at a recent Forrester Research study which lists 53 search marketing agencies and selects the top six based upon revenues, balance of services and enterprise focus. There&#8217;s lots of interesting information relating to the strengths and weaknesses of each of the six top providers and tips for selecting your own vendor. You can [...]
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A variant of an older worm is poorly designed, but it nonetheless shows the effectiveness of our manager's incident-response process.
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If you think of your business as a car and your IT infrastructure as the road it travels on, then your business processes are the tires that let the car move along the road. What we are seeing now, at an ever increasing rate, is CFOs asking CIOs to kick the tires and check the air pressure. Analogies aside, CFOs want CIOs to get more involved in process design across the company.
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.