Earlier this week I attended the CFO conference in NYC.  It was very interesting talking to CFO’s and Finance directors about how they are addressing performance management in their organizations.  Most of those who I talked to were inspired to dive more into performance management (and BI in general) but had not necessarily taken the plunge yet.  Microsoft had a booth, which interestingly enough came in 4 boxes with no instructions.  Now, for trade show experts that might not be a problem but for 3 guys from the development team with no marketing/trade show experience, building this booth this was an interesting challenge.  After unpacking all of the boxes, we were staring at posters, felt carpets, metal rods, magnets and an expandable wire frame. It was like looking at a gigantic jig saw puzzle spread out all over the floor with no box to see the picture!  Luckily, we were surrounded by trade show roadies (those people who travel from one show to another and give you the same pitch) and they were able to easily master the challenge of setting up the booth.  Rule of thumb: don't send out members from you R&D department and expect them to put together a marketing booth with no instructions!

Anyways, back to the topic at hand.  The comment that everyone seemed to state when they stopped at the booth was "Wow, I didn't realize that Microsoft was in the Performance Management business."  Immediately followed up by - "what is Performance Point"?  So I figure that’s what I'll blog about. You can check out the Performance Point web site www.microsoft.com/performancepoint for starters.  That gives the basic overview of the product and how it may apply to your organization. Let me also give you my perspective.

Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 allows you to plan, monitor and analyze your business performance and assist in driving corporate strategy. So what the heck does that mean?  Sounds like a bunch of marketing buzzwords. What exactly is a performance management solution you might say?  Well, performance management is different for everyone.  For some people, it understands the trends of past performance in concert with defining complex algorithms to measure and predict the future costs and profitability of your business. Then, using those predictions to align corporate strategy and monitor your performance.  This is very import to our finance departments (at MS we've deployed Performance Point to our finance team) to help with budgeting and forecasting.  Performance Point can also be used to help predict and plan for changes in your market due to competitor discounts, new products, etc and help change strategy.  It can also be as easy as creating a dashboard of key performance indicators for account teams to monitor their sales quota each month.  At the end of the day, Performance Point is about giving you the tools to define how to analyze, plan and monitor your business.  And when needed, empowering you to change strategy based on your data.

Currently Microsoft has 2 separate products which solve some of the performance management requirements: Business Scorecard Manager 2005 and ProClarity Analytics 6.3.  Both of these products have been incorporated into Performance Point Server 2007 with the addition of new planning component (formally known as Biz#) which helps you model and plan your business.  Tougher, Microsoft now provides one product which ties together the cycle of performance management.

It is an exciting time for performance management and based on all the feedback I’ve received from our early adopters, Microsoft Office Performance Point Server 2007 is going to make a real impact in the market.  For anyone who wants to try out the product you can download the CTP2 release at http://connect.microsoft.com.  This site also contains training documents and enrolls you into a newsgroup where you can ask the development team questions.

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