At the first annual Business Performance Management Summit, held last fall, practitioners, consultants, academics, and vendors met to discuss issues and trends that are critical to the implementation of business performance management (BPM) software and processes. The event's meetings were organized around four essential themes: technology, culture, analytics, and ROI. The following excerpts from their discussions demonstrate the challenges inherent in improving systems, processes, metrics, and strategies to achieve better business management.

The sessions were moderated by John O'Rourke, Hyperion; Jim Bramante, IBM Business Consulting Services; Kraig Haberer, SAP; George Veth, Painted Word; David Axson, Bank of America; Chris Iervolino, ITEC Consulting Inc.; Robin Ranzal Knowles, Ranzal & Associates; Robert Kugel, Ventana Research; John Van Decker, META Group Inc.; Craig Schiff, BPM Partners; Jane C. Linder, Accenture Institute for High Performance Business; and Lawrence Serven, The Buttonwood Group.

Kraig Haberer, Global Director, Financial Management, SAP: Where are you in the BPM process? For those of you who have already undertaken an initiative, have you gotten a green light from management to go forth and expand the scope?

James Turner, Executive Director, Verizon: We're actually about three years into it. We completed a financial performance management initiative as a first step; we're now working on the operational components and we're building dashboards for executives, saving the best for last. Operational requires a great deal of data mining, a great deal of alignment around the data, ensuring we have a common dialogue when we talk about it -- so we're now beginning that phase.

Judd Nystrom, Director of Finance, Best Buy: Our primary reporting tools are Essbase and Adaytum (Cognos). While we pull information from various systems, we do not have a holistic scorecard or dashboard-type software. We just proved the value of putting all the information together, and now we are figuring out how to automate it.

Lawrence Serven, Principal, The Buttonwood Group: In a company like Best Buy, where you went from $1 billion to -- what was it, $24 billion? -- were you able to grow because of BPM, or in spite of it?

Susan Grafton, Senior Director of Finance, Best Buy: We didn't start to see the benefits of BPM until two years ago, when the new ledger and the new financial systems -- our ERP implementation -- were launched. By that time, much of the growth had already taken place, making the financial work all the more difficult. Too much of the financial measurement and analysis was still manual, or very difficult to do, because the infrastructure had not kept pace with the growth of the company. The BPM processes have allowed us to catch up to the size of the company and provide the level and quality of output that we need to provide to our internal customers.

So I would say we got to much of the first $20 billion in spite of it. But BPM is certainly part of how we will get the next $20 billion. It's part of how we're not going to let our competitors eat our lunch.

Serven: What are some strategic goals your company has? How do you think BPM can help address those strategic goals?

Jason Kaffenberger, Financial Analyst, ING: Customer retention and growing market share would be the two primary strategic goals. And an area where we would address that would be segmenting the market and targeting the customers that are going to be most beneficial.

Turner: A first [strategic goal] would be to achieve regulatory relief, second would be to capture the broadband market, and third would be top-line growth in our wire-line market. Now that Verizon is truly a national/international organization, we can better serve enterprise clients. Of course, we emphasize product innovation.

How is BPM helping with all of this? We've deployed dashboards to reflect these objectives. Key executives are able to look at how market conditions and operational and financial conditions are changing, and translate that to how it can impact shareholder value. I think we're pretty much on track to leverage BPM against these strategies. We've got the awareness, we've got the common dialogue; we now need to focus on refining the data and changing our systems and processes as these initiatives change.