cally you don’t get performance management. You get enterprise reporting—the
one size fits all, “let’s deliver data warehousing and some reporting tools to the
end users,” to reduce the numbers of user
requests for reports. It’s well intentioned,
but it doesn’t really meet the users’ needs
and it’s not really going to move the organization forward.
Conversely, if you have the users or
the business driving the performance
management initiatives, you might actually
get some near-term benefit, and it may
meet the needs of that particular function
or department, but they create bigger
problems downstream. They really don’t
help the enterprise as a whole. Ultimately, you want to have that alignment
of purpose between finance, operations,
and IT—everybody really needs to come
together to drive performance management successfully within an organization.
If the entire senior management team has
a vision for performance management,
that’s probably 50 percent of the battle.
KOPCKE: What tools or technologies
do you think are vital to the success of
performance management?
DRESNER: You need to have coherent ERP and operational systems in
place, because that’s where we get the
key information that’s going to support
performance management. But in order
to support the management processes,
you’ve got to support the strategy formulation, the goal-setting process, and the
execution of that. Then ing able to strategically
you must be able to deploy with a core set
evaluate it, which means of tools and technolo-that you do need some gies. But it’s not easy, and
key business intelligence consolidation is the re-technologies—the classic ally thorny part, because
dashboarding and report- nobody wants to give up
ing capabilities—but their tool. That’s why even
you also need modeling though many organiza-capabilities. You need tions do standardize,
enterprise-planning John Kopcke, Oracle they continue to expand
capabilities and in-depth the numbers of tools out
analytics to support there. They really need
those various manage- to have the conviction
ment functions. It builds and a process in place
on what we already to winnow it down to a
understand as business manageable number. It’s a
intelligence and lever- painful process, but when
ages those key ERP and you get through the end
operational systems, of it, life really is much
but it’s taking it a step better for the enterprise
beyond that. as a whole.
KOPCKE: Do you KOPCKE: What should
believe that standardiza- Howard Dresner, Dresner business leaders who are
tion of technologies or Advisory Services interested in joining this
tools is important to being successful in revolution be doing?
performance management? DRESNER: To start off with, find some
DRESNER: Sure. The problem is that allies—the folks out there that are like-organizations have too many overlap- minded. It would be even better if they
ping tools, and unfortunately, every tool are outside of your function. The other
out there has a slightly different way of thing you need to do is a self-assessment
representing data. They have different to figure out where you are within the
user interfaces, semantics, et cetera. If continuum of performance management
you standardize and consolidate, you’ll so that you can begin to identify what
save a lot of money, and certainly that’s needs to be done. That’s a step in the
important, but the greatest benefit is be- right direction.
financial systems. “We now have clearly defined ownership of the
master data,” says Bret Furtwengler, vice president of financial
systems at Fifth Third Bank. “That’s key.”
The team implemented a new business process that has
revolutionized data management at the bank: Anyone who
wants to add a company, delete something, change the hierarchy
structures, or make any kind of change to the finance master
data has to pass that transaction through a rigorous review that
includes representatives from the regulatory, tax, general accounting, finance, and financial systems groups. “When someone
says, ‘I want to add this account,’ the representatives look at the
account to make sure that it’s not redundant—that it’s relevant,
meaningful, and necessary. So now accounts don’t just get added
haphazardly,” says Furtwengler. The group also ensures that new
accounts and cost centers are managed in the correct hierarchies.
This process has reduced additions by 75 percent.
After a request is submitted and approved, a primary master
data management administrator puts it into the master data
management system. System administrators can then choose
how they want to use and incorporate that data. This transparent
process also helps the company with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
The company started the new process with just a core set of
the financial systems but eventually expanded it throughout the
enterprise. “We began to see consistency across the key systems
that generated the reports that went across the executives’
desks. When we saw that this was working out well over time,
it became the de facto standard for finance master data,” says
Furtwengler. The group now uses Hyperion Data Relationship
Management to manage change across all financial master data
hierarchies—including cost centers, entities, and companies, as
well as their respective relationships, attributes, and properties.
A large number of systems pull data from the Hyperion
Data Relationship Management tool, says Furtwengler. “They
know that it is the definitive truth, the definitive definition for
