It goes without saying that in most industries, the companies with the best chance of success are those that respond quickly and appropriately to change. Businesses are continuously staking their future on their answers to questions such as: How can we make a profit on this new product, given all the costs we need to allocate to it this year? If we acquire that business, how will the trans­action affect our results? What is the impact on manufacturing and shipping if the price of fuel increases 15 percent during the second quarter?

These and the myriad of other, similar tough questions that executives must answer on a daily basis will always, of course, be subject to unpredictable external influences. But when managers have hard data to support their answers, they can have more confidence in their decisions.

That's why the business performance management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) applications that are converging into what I call "business analytics" are so critical to decision-makers. An analytics platform with a broad scope can merge data analysis across finance, strategic planning, sales, marketing, operations, and HR, providing real-time access to previous periods' performance data, as well as forward-looking scenario planning, for functions throughout the company. By making this full spectrum of information available to managers in every corner of the business, an organization fosters rapid innovation in products, services, and channels; fast business restructuring; and, ultimately, an improvement in market share. Award-winning CIO and author Michael Hugos suggests that even a floundering project or product line can be revitalized: "Agile systems enable companies to capitalize on opportunities before the profit margins drop."

A company that is implementing BPM software with the goal of improving its agility must ensure that the analytics capabilities of the system it chooses are adequate and that it consolidates data from across the enterprise. The solution needs to facilitate broad participation in planning and analytics, and it should enable managers to view a period's actuals against each individual department's plan. It should also help orchestrate the distribution of resources.

Factors That Strengthen Analytics

To meet an organization's needs in the culture of speed, a combined BI/BPM application should have certain key capabilities:

A single platform for budgeting, forecasting, planning, consolidations, reporting, and analysis. Many business analytics systems either focus very narrowly on single components of performance management, such as consolidations, or else consist of disparate individual applications that are coupled only loosely. Problems with either approach are well-documented; foremost among them is the fact that both situations often lead to the storage of performance information in multiple data stores. Midmarket companies, in particular, are attracted to analytics systems that offer one integrated platform for all performance management activities. The components work together with little effort on the customer's part, and all analytic activities rely on the same data and metadata, so all business teams work with the same set of data. Plus, every user can query and report from the same solution without bouncing into a new application and so having to navigate through multiple user interfaces.

Easy-to-use self-service interfaces. As enterprises expand performance management responsibilities into business units that have traditionally been siloed, more and more users with little finance experience are working with BPM applications. These users need software with which they can easily generate reports, drill into data, and perform what-if analyses.

Some business analytics packages offer advanced features that help the novice performance analyzer stay self-sufficient. They let companies set up personalized interfaces, such as home pages with navigation to reports and templates for planning and analytical applications. They contain basic wizards; workflow functionality; visualization tools (charts, graphs, tables, etc.); prebuilt databases; and sample data cubes.

High-performance analytics. Because business agility means contracting decision cycles, rapid analytics and immediate access to updated data are imperative. Financial analysts, controllers, CFOs, and line-of-business managers expect to change the values of input data and perform recalculations on the fly. Teams across the organization may need to perform analyses on frequently changing data on millions of transactions, such as customer acquisition and retention rates or daily or hourly sales by store, brand, or representative. Companies looking to improve their agility through BPM and analytics should look for applications that include concurrent read/write capabilities to facilitate collaborative planning, support for simultaneous evaluation of multiple what-if scenarios and varying assumptions, instantaneous availability of changes to models or data, and multidimensional analysis of business information. The faster recalculations occur and updated information is disseminated, the more agile corporate decision-making will be.

Unlimited scalability. As a company provides greater numbers of knowledge workers with analytics and its data stores grow exponentially, its business analytics solution must scale to meet this increased demand. It should roll out quickly to new users, and it should support as many users as the company can envision ever performing analyses simultaneously. Another consideration is the software's ability to scale "out" to serve geographically diverse users.

Agility isn't an impossible dream. It's possible, and it's worth pursuing because the rewards are nearly limitless. In this day and age, competitive advantage requires an organization to be agile. One of the key components to achieving this state is having software with a powerful business analytics component that's also flexible, easy to use, and scalable.

Ben Plummer is vice president of worldwide marketing at Applix, in which capacity he is responsible for strategic marketing and product direction.