BPM Visionaries

Presentations now available

2006-05-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Presentations from the Solutions 2006 breakout sessions are now available. Find out more about the latest BI tools, technology, and more.

MARKET FOR INFORMATION

2006-04-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

There were around 5000 people here at Solutions 2006. Lots of customers, partners, press, analysts and Hyperion people. Solutions, in the end, was just one big market, not unlike the market I always go to buy bread, eggs, fish, fruits and vegetables in the historic city center of Utrecht, The Netherlands, where I live. Hyperion displayed its products and services and you, walking around, were able to think about buying them or expanding on your investment in products you already have. At the same time, there were hundreds of speaking sessions with case studies, new Hyperion developments, that are based on the principles of supply and demand too. You came here with certain expectations of what you wanted to hear about, and looked for the suppliers of that information in their presentations.

But did you know there is such a market for information within your organization too (and Howard in his keynote speech even went as far as calling it a black market)? There is demand for information, coming from the various managers in the organization who are always looking for new insights. And there is supply of information by the knowledge workers or analysts in your organizations, whose job it is to find, compile, analyze and provide that information. Interestingly enough, this market is in perfect alignment. Managers often want more information and have a different questions everyday, and the knowledge workers increase footprint by supplying ever more information. Unfortunately, this market is not always aligned with the corporate objectives, where we wish to limit the incredibly heap of spreadsheets and ad hoc information requests and create a more focused set of information. Once we realize it is a market we are dealing with, we can apply market principles in achieve corporate objectives:

First of all, we can influence demand and supply. For instance with education, why it is so important to have less versions of the truth instead of more. Or we can reward the knowledge workers who initiate a spring cleaning and actively reduce the number of reports they produce, and spend more time analyzing instead of collecting data. Second, we can regulate the market, by actively discouraging people to bring homegrown spreadsheets into the meeting. Spreadsheets are fine, but they need to be connected to the overall BPM system. Lastly, we can start a new market. I see many organizations go into the third generation of data warehousing. After the hard-wired corporate MIS of the 80s and the flexible but disparate data warehouses of the 90s, regulations such as SOX drive organizations to consolidate their data warehouses into a single one, that combines the central view with flexible access. One organization I recently encountered went as far as to ask knowledge workers to apply for a new position around the newly created reporting structure.

So think about your Solutions visit and how the market for information there behaved. Perhaps it helps you to drive the market for information in your organization...

Looking forward to going home again and celebrating Queen's day this Saturday. In the meantime, feel free to send any comments to frank_buytendijk@nospam.hyperion.com (remove the nospam from the address to reach me)...

More to Life than BPM

2006-04-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

I am the shy, quiet type so I have to push myself to network at these conferences. It is the casual conversations during the breaks and at the exhibit hall that are the gems here.

Co-workers from a financial services firm are trying to understand what each other does. The data warehouse team wants to know what the finance team does with all these Hyperion products, and the finance techies want to know where the data warehouse fits in. I am glad to see the dialog.

However, confusion about the benefits of System 9 for customers with simple deployments abound. “If I only have Planning (or Intelligence … or FM …), why should I upgrade?” Gripes about the enablement fee and pricing are repeated several times.

Yet the conversation that stays with me the longest is with Tim Tow, President of Applied OLAP (http://www.appliedolap.com/olapFront.asp?ID=2), a long-time Hyperion partner. Our paths have sometimes criss-crossed, and it’s years since I’ve seen him. I try to understand how their spreadsheet product can actually be better than SmartView when our conversation drifts to something I had read about him. One of Tim’s hobbies is flying so he owns a plane. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Tim volunteered his plane and his time to fly rescue missions for Angel Flight. He shares stories of things I didn’t catch on CNN, some disturbing and some inspiring. Our conversation reminds me there is more to life than BI and BPM and that those who have teased me about my “rose-colored glasses” are wrong: there are many good corporate leaders out there.

My journey home is a long-one, and I stumble through the door in the early morning hours. There are two home-baked cookies waiting for me on the table with a note from my 10-year old daughter. “Welcome back. Megan XOX.”

2006-04-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening there was a meeting and webcast with industry analysts, financial analysts and press. Godfrey opened the meeting with reading out the smallprint, somewhat along these lines...

Statements in this presentation relating to the future, including (1) those related to our “Business Outlook”; (2) our expectations related to market share and revenue growth; (3) those related to our stock repurchase program; and (4) those related to our customers’ uses of our products, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as, “may,” “will,” “should,” “potential,” “estimated,” “projects,” “anticipate,” “plans,” “expects,” “believes” and similar expressions. Because these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, there are important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.
...
For a more detailed discussion of factors that could affect the company's performance and cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, interested parties should review the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q
....
The company does not undertake an obligation to update its forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

After reading this out, there was a open, candid and lively discussion where Godfrey, Robin, Heidi, John, Howard and Robert provided good input on questions from the audience.

But this is not always the case. With so many strict regulations, and draconic measures if a company fails to comply, the effect might be the opposite to what was intended. Instead of more transparency, in many cases it leads to less transparency. In the newspaper I have read about a company cancelling its quarterly meeting because it felt it couldn't say more than issued in the press release. Increasingly, companies give no or less guidance. If the regulations do not specifically require it, it won't be done.

This tactical behavior is very understandable, it is a case of risk mitigation. However, there is also an opportunity. In the complexities of our business world, it's all about multidimensional competition. We do not only compete for the customers in the market, but also for the best staff, the best partners, and the best capital. Capital flows to where it is welcome, and there is a business case to be made for outperforming the competition on transparency. If you have the controls in place and provide a transparent view, the competition has to follow and may have to rush into it.

Many of the US regulations, such as SOX, are 'rules-based'. It is exactly described what needs to be done. Many European regulations are 'principle-based', where the regulators require information to be published 'in sufficient detail', or companies can choose to not comply with certain regulations as long as they explain why (comply-or-explain).

Maybe I am not objective and a bit too patriotic as a Dutchmen, but aren't principle-based regulations better? Would these not better facilitate the market and free competition, in this case the competition for capital?

Let me know what you think. I'd love to have a good debate. Send your email to frank_buytendijk@nospam.hyperion.com (remove the nospam from the email address to reach me).

frank

Catching the BUZZ

2006-04-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

This is not my first Solutions. I visited Hyperion Solutions in Orlando, in Chicago, in Paris and in Barcelona. What always strikes me is the "buzz". There is a lot of energy and a lot of excitement. For all of us! Being a 'BI guy' for all my professional life, it triggered the following question: How to you measure 'buzz'???

* How many people attended, how many sessions there were, how many liters of coffee were served?
* The average width of grin in centimeters on attendee faces?
* Decibels of applause during the keynote speech?
* Mean time between jumping up and down?
* Average bar bill between 10pm-2am?

As much as I would like to see an Essbase cube that allows you to slice and dice that data, I somehow think it just doesn't catch the meaning of "buzz"...

Perhaps this idea can be used in our organizations as well, when we look at our dashboards and scorecards. We put so much effort in quantifying everything, that we tend to forget qualitative feedback. In the business world, we analyze so much customer data, that we oversee that it makes sense to sometimes simply ask customers how we are doing. Or co-workers, or business partners.

And I think that is why most people attend Solutions anyway. It's quality time, not quantity time ;-). To watch your peers present their case studies and give you their take-aways so you can compare. And the same goes for Hyperion. For instance, in R&D Central we show all the new stuff, and get your reaction as feedback.

In BPM, it's important to collect the numbers and analyze them. Not to take them for granted, but to spark a good discussion on the assumptions behind those numbers. And to trigger the next round of questions. It's not the dashboard itself that brings insight, but the story it tells...

frank

R&D Central - a Glimpse of the Future

2006-04-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

According to Chief Development Officer Robert Gersten what started in a janitor's closet several years ago has become a conference institution: R&D central, a place where customers and analysts alike get a glimpse of future developments.

It is an interesting difference from many user conferences where the predominant practice is to show GA software only, or at most, beta. Software in R&D central is neither. Some of the products are due out in the fall release, some next year, and some are still in the idea stage. Gersten claims that R&D central is just one way of ensuring customer-driven development.

For me, keeping even the current capabilities of all the vendor products straight in my head is a challenge, so I headed for the stations that addressed near term releases. I am most excited about business information views and improvements in Smart View for Office. I’ve been critical of Brio, later Hyperion Intelligence, and now System 9 Interactive Reporting for lacking a robust meta data layer (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163100823). If you are deploying across the enterprise, a business meta data layer ensures one version of the truth and promotes re-usability. Long-time Brio customers tell me, though, that they like the flexibility of not having to build such a meta data layer. It seems that Hyperion “Business Information Views” address both requirements. Hyperion is consistent in its strategy to ensure that the business information views span the spectrum of BPM, providing a consistent view of metrics that may come from Planning, Financial Management (FM), Essbase, or a relational data source. Bravo!

Smart View for Office, meanwhile, currently is powerful for OLAP, FM, and Planning, but it is cumbersome for accessing Interactive Reports (http://dev.hyperion.com/resource_library/white_papers/bis_wp.pdf). What I saw in R&D central could make this product one of the strongest and certainly the broadest of leading BI vendors.

… on another note, I think if some entrepreneur set up a booth here to sell Heelies, they’d make a fortune, and I’d get to a few more track sessions on time!

A great day!

2006-04-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday felt like the longest day ever, but it was a great one. I hope you all had a successful day and are prepared for another successful (albeit long) day.

I had a chance to meet with so many customers yesterday and began to get of sense of who you all are, and how you feel about Hyperion. While I've met with scores of customers, one-on-one, since I joined Hyperion, it's not the same as being with 4,000 of you, in one place, where we not only had business meetings, but socialized in the evening.

After last night I realized that Hyperion is more than a software company. It's much more like a family. Most of you have known Hyperion for many years. You know the people and the products and each other. And, you all have great Hyperion (and other) stories to tell - some of them pretty funny.

Thanks to all of you for being so welcoming to me, and for making me feel like part of the family. I look forward to more discussions (and stories) today and tonight.

-howard

P.S. Don't worry John (you know who you are), I promise not to tell Aunt Mabel about what you did to the dog in 1967.

Booz Allen Hamilton - Why System 9

2006-04-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

Booz Allen Hamilton was one of the early adopters of System 9. After rapid sales growth, multiple versions of the truth, and at least 8 different BI tools, they knew they had to standardize on a BPM platform. They standardized on Hyperion System 9 last fall, using Performance Scorecard, Planning, Essbase, and Interactive Reporting to build dashboards. The SmartView Office add-in has helped them reduce a 12-day manual process of building Power Point briefing books to just a few days. Booz Allen Hamilton raved about Hyperion's support and account management, clearly a selling point as BPM systems are increasingly enterprise wide and of strategic importance.

Yet they also described a reality that many organizations face as part of BI standardization: they have a heavy investment in another BI tool used predominantly for operational reporting. Hyperion would have liked them to switch exclusively to Hyperion System 9, and the other BPM vendor is of course trying to increase their footprint.

So while vendors today offer customers much broader solutions than before, the truth is that converting legacy deployments is fraught with political issues and a lower priority.

The BPM (R)evolution

2006-04-24T16:43:00.000-07:00

We heard Howard Dresner and John Kopcke this morning talk about the BPM Revolution. Certainly there is a technology revolution, which I talked about a little bit in my previous posting "BI Paradox". There is also a revolution in the management processes. The way companies turn traditional financial budgets into rolling forecasts makes a night and day difference. And there is a cultural revolution, where (slooooooooowly) data is not treated as a means of power, but as a true corporate asset.

But this revolution for the business in many cases is a logical evolution for the CFO. In the last 20 years of the previous century (goodness, does that sound long ago) most organizations moved from purely financial accounting and control (FA&C) to management accounting and control MA&C). The original purely operational tasks (balance sheet is correct and all invoices are sent out) were greatly expand and the CFO in most cases is the financial conscience of the organization, responsible for many M&A activities, investment analysis, etc.

BPM is nothing more than the next logical step, with the CFO becoming the quantitative conscience of the organization. In the end non-financial KPIs require the same skills, processes and systems as financial KPIs. Not much of a difference. Also the role of the finance department evolves. In the FA&C days is was operational and finance internally focused. In the MA&C the finance department ran the management process, also outside the finance office. In the BPM (r)evolution, finance coordinates the BPM processes, but let's the business department run them.

BPM: a leap in business management, but simply the logical next step for finance...

frank

Customer Secrets to BPM Success

2006-04-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

Whew, I survived the general session without tripping going up the stairs!

It was hard to hear everything from back stage, but CEO Godfrey Sullivan’s talk was pleasant and personable. In an era of corporate scandals, it’s refreshing to hear someone both talk about being a good corporate citizen and also demonstrate it. New CSO Howard Dresner rallied a call for a BPM Revolution, and CTO John Kopcke gave a sneak peak of enhancements to System 9 (must make it a point to stop by R&D central to learn more….)

I had a chance to share the customer challenges, and secrets to BPM Success:

Business and IT must be partners: Too often, there is an “us versus them” mentality and IT acts as a gatekeeper to the data and technologies. IT really needs to do more to learn the business language. Not sure how? Invite yourself to a business unit meeting! Know what drives performance in your company: is it revenue growth? Least cost? Customer service? Don’t expect the business to understand the techno babble of SOA, XML/A, OLAP, ETL, any more than your car repair man expects you to identify components under the hood (okay, maybe you’re good at this, but I’m not). Here is the great thing about the conference: I referenced a quote from author Jeremy Hope’s book Re-inventing the CFO (should be required reading for any BI/BPM professionals) and later bumped into his business partner.

Recognize that BPM is an Evolution: When discussing BI and BPM with one of my customers, the CIO of a Biotech said, “I’ll worry about BPM later, right now our users can’t even get to the data.” BPM is sometimes a starting point, but most often, it’s an evolution. Some companies may start with a planning application, others with some scorecards, and most, with rudimentary reports as a way of providing business users access to data. The problem is if you stop there; if it’s just data, and not the right data. IT often provides users too much detail and data because we don’t know what drives the business. We don’t adequately help them prioritize. Instead, we should ensure that the data within any data mart or data warehouse helps improve business performance at all levels. One of my customers thought they were doing reasonably well here. They had a goal of growing revenues. For this indicator, they were on a roll, growing revenues more than 10% a year. But then Hurricane Katrina struck, supplies tightened, margins shrunk and the company lost money. Initially, they failed to adapt their goals to the changing business environment. They were looking at the wrong data--data that ultimately was only one small piece of their total business performance.

BI is the Foundation for BPM: BPM across the enterprise requires an enterprise BI platform that must be treated as a strategic asset. Departmental solutions are silos and do little to align individual business units and functions. According to a TDWI survey I co-authored, 42% of companies said that the reason they have so many individual tools is because departments can buy their own solution. This gets back to the first point: if IT and the business have not partnered together, business units will do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. The majority of companies are trying to standardize on a BI platform across the enterprise. The two biggest reasons cited are to lower the cost of ownership and provide one version of the truth. To be sure, if you do BPM right, the number of users will increase dramatically. Having one set of tools, a common server environment, and one point of user provisioning is a smart way to lower your cost of ownership while still increasing the number of users.

Interviewing customers Jan Tonnessen, CIO of Norway Post and Jeff Brobst, VP of Financial Planning and Analysis for Symantec was enlightening. The results of their BPM culture are astounding. Of course, Jeff had to give me a hard time about not updating my virus definitions often enough so I had to give him some grief about Norway Post not being a Symantec customer.

Now, it's off to some track sessions ...

BI Paradox

2006-04-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

In Howard's previous post, he mentioned the BI Paradox and the fundamental differences between IT and the business.

I actually think that could be changing. What is a paradox? It is something that looks like a contradiction, but perhaps is not. Usually you can solve a paradox by bringing in a 'third element'. The third element changes the dynamic between the 2 contradictions and unites the two.

In BI and BPM the CIO and CFO (or other business executives) have conflicting requirements. The CIO needs to have a single platform that is scalable, manageable and has a good performance. The CFO needs to have a platform that solves problems fast. So far, it has led to a disparate relationship between the CIO's data warehouse and the business BI and BPM systems. Or it has led to a situation where one camp 'won': a single BI tool where the business is unhappy with, or BI-galore.

A service-oriented architecture makes a difference. It seems that in the business software world, we are reaching already a second generation of SOA thinking. The first generation was dominated by the techies. SOA was there to make development of software easier.

In the second generation, BI/BPM functionality starts to swap sides between infrastructure and application. Think about it: application nuggets such as a dashboard, a workflow, a planning grid are totally generic and be reused for multiple purposes. These move from the application layer into the infrastructure layer as 'services'. Development functions however move from the infrastructure to the user layer, so that users can now glue their own applications together in a visual style. Have a look at the new 'BPM Architect' in R&D Central to see what I mean.

This second generation, a service-oriented business application, is the 'solving element' of the paradox. By reshuffling the components of the suite, IT does infrastructure things and business is responsible for its applications. The System 9 platform unites both the CFO (and other business executives) with the CIO.

Ok, I can hear you thinking, if there is a second generation, what is the 3rd? That is where IT and Business now are able to team up and create new business models. A service-oriented organization! Business processes and the accompanying management system are not defined inside-out anymore from organization to its customers in a hard-wired way, but the business model starts to consist of services, that customers glue together as they go in working with you. Outside-in. I have always been impressed with www.nikeid.com. As a customer, you can design your own shoes, have the produced and have them shipped to you. So where does the front-office stop here, and does the back-office begin? There is no difference anymore.

You see, it is an outside in approach. A process defined in the steps the customer likes. That's a service oriented organization.

We not only need new transactional systems to pull this off, but it sets an entirely new standard for flexibility of the management system.

Are you trying to achieve something like this in your company? Drop me a note at frank_buytendijk@nospam.hyperion.com (remove the nospam part from the email address to reach me). I'd love to learn from you...

This morning's presentation

2006-04-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Hope everyone enjoyed my presentation on the "BPM Revolution" this morning. The analogy occured to me a couple of months ago while discussing "information democracy". Sometimes it's fun to use analogies and a bit of humor to encourage us to look at some pretty complex problems.

It reminds me of a skit that Frank Buytendijk and I used to do while at Gartner, called the "BI Paradox", where he played the business user and I played the "IT guy". We used this skit to address the fundamental differences between the two cultures, approaches and even languages. This underscores a "truth" surrounding BPM -the greatest challenges are human and not technological.

I hope that today's presentation helped to bring some things into focus and have helped you to bring the BPM Revolution to your organization.

P.S. You might note that I did not include Finance as one of the "camps". Any guesses as to what we would have called them, had they been included???

See you around the show floor!

-howard

Search Alone Is Useless

2006-04-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning John Kopcke mentioned the need for simplified user interfaces and showed some examples of what we call 'business language search'.

You may have seen some of the hype in the industry around search and BI. First of all, I would like to comment that I think the combination of Search and BI is crucial, so that Search can connect the quantitative and qualitative world. It is also necessary for information democracy, as 100,000s of BI users simply have different requirements than 100s of users.

Search reveals again the importance of the key issue we are trying to solve in the world of BI: the single version of the truth. Plain and simply put: Search is completely useless without the one version of the truth.

The one version of the truth is not so easy to reach though. Let me quote, in all modesty, one of the laws of Buytendijk: the more a certain business term is connected with the core of the organization, the more definitions of it are around. Think of the term 'call' for a telecom company, the term 'flight' for an airline or the term 'policy' for an insurance company, or 'revenue' for most companies. It sounds counterintuitive but it isn't. If it's the core of the organization, most departments have a stake in that business term.

Without the one version of the truth, a search for 'revenue report' will lead to literally tens of results and you have no idea which one has the best fit. And it gets worse, if you are trying to then drill down, and look at revenue per product, region or customer. Which of the many customer or product tables to use?

Partly this is a governance issue and Hyperion helps customers with this every single day. And partly it is something to be addressed with technology.

Hyperion has come a long way in cracking the code of the real problem, with the introduction of master data management (MDM) as well as the metadata management of System 9.

With that, Search is only the icing on the cake, and not the cake itself. Maybe that's a nice tagline for our new brand as well: "Hyperion. Cake 'R' Us." ;-)

frank

Hello and Welcome to Solutions 2006!

2006-04-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I left Gartner six months ago to join Hyperion as its new Chief Strategy Officer. It's been quite a change for me after 13 years at Gartner. I came from the vendor world before Gartner and spent part of my 13 years there as a "recovering vendor". So, now I'm getting reacquainted with being a vendor and am (for now) a "recovering analyst". However, I will work to keep a few important analyst traits - such as asking lots of questions.

People often ask, why did I leave Gartner and why did I join Hyperion. The answer to the first question is that I had done everything I had hoped to at Gartner and needed a new challenge and an opportunity to have a new kind of impact. Of course, many of you already know the answer to the second question. Hyperion's a great company with amazing people and a corporate culture that embraces personal, professional integrity and intense customer focus. I have been delighted at how helpful people have been and how open they are to new ideas.

As the market continues its shift towards BPM, I believe that Hyperion is entering an exciting new period of its history - one which I wanted to help make possible and be a part of.

Looking forward to meeting as many of you as I can in the next three days!!!!

Regards,

Howard

A Blogging Doubter and First Look at the Conference

2006-04-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

Are you reading this blog? When? From Where? I confess that I am a skeptic about blogging. Who has the time to read these entries? Are you reading this before or after you’ve read Intelligent Enterprise, CIO Insight and USA Today cover to cover?

For those who don’t know me, I have been working in this space for about 18 years now, initially for a Fortune 500 company, later for Deloitte & Touche, and now as an independent industry analyst and consultant. Simply put, I love what I do. I publish the BIScorecard,http://www.biscorecard.com and hopefully, you’ve read some of my Intelligent Enterprise articles (or did that get usurped in place of this blog?). My transition to being an analyst has largely happened through TDWI, whom I write and teach for. Their educational conferences are excellent and go into more depth than many other industry conferences. I teach Evaluating BI Toolsets and recently revamped the course to add a live vendor bake-off (http://www.tdwi.org/education/conferences/chicago2006/sessions2.aspx?session_code=595). Having Hyperion demo head-to-head against arch competitors Cognos, Business Objects, and MicroStrategy is an enlightening (although nerve wracking) session to moderate. If you want to catch a small glimpse of some of these differences, tune into this Webinar that Hyperion is co-sponsoring on May 3 (http://www.tdwi.org/education/Webinars/index.aspx).

This is my fifth Hyperion conference and the thing that astounds me each year is the sheer size of the conference – over 5000 attendees. The reception was Las Vegas style, with belly dancers and stilt walkers in sparkling suits.

No time for gambling for me tonight. Tomorrow, I have the honor of speaking during the general session and introducing two customers who are BPM visionaries. Working with customers is the best part of being an analyst. I like finding those nuggets of wisdom and unearthing insights that help others. Do I get nervous speaking in front of large groups? Of course! In fact, I had a nightmare a few weeks ago that I went on stage without my shoes, called the customer by a wrong name, and brought the wrong Power Point. Was this a premonition or typical angst? Stay tuned …

SHAMELESS PLUG

2006-04-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

The coolest thing about a blog is that I can write about - basically - everything that comes to mind. Well, one of the most pressing things that is on my mind is my presentation on Wednesday, with a lot of new material and new insights.

The presentation is about the human side of BPM. How does measurement impact organizational behavior? The fact that we measure makes that people start to behave differently already, and vice versa, certain behaviors, generic for all people or specific to your organization, affect how people deal with the metrics you put in place. I think, after being in the industry for over 15 years now, since about a year or two I really understand why there are so many games around the numbers in our organizations. And more important, what we can do about it to make sure we drive the behaviors we want, in order to be successful. In the end, there are patterns in these behaviors, that can be predicted, if only we pay attention to them while implementing or running BPM programmes. I had to challenge much of the conventional wisdom around metrics, but I think the code is cracked now.

You know, the best definition of leadership I ever heard was really simple: achieving results through other people. In order to do so we must understand human behavior. And metrics help doing that. It allows us to grow. From performance measurement, where we measure the results, to performance management, where we create insight in the business. And then from performance management to performance leadership, where we define stretch targets and find ways to consistently make them.

Want to find out how? Want to hear about the human side of BPM? Are you interested in the real reason why initiatives are a wild success or somehow still need to deliver what was promised?

Just drop an email to stacey_august@hyperion.com registering for this special session on Wednesday 11am. Room Reef A, Level 2.

End of sameless promotion of my session...

INTRODUCING MYSELF

2006-04-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

So I am new to Hyperion... My name is Frank Buytendijk, and I joined Hyperion april 1st. I work for Howard Dresner, Hyperion's Chief Strategy Officer, in the Office of Strategy, as VP Corporate Strategy. I am based in The Netherlands and although the role will be World Wide, I will have a special focus on Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Although I am new to Hyperion as an employee, we go way back already. I worked for Gartner Research and I covered Hyperion as an analyst. I have had numerous meetings with the management team and always enjoyed the conversations. The reason why I joined Hyperion is not only to be part of the trends that I predicted, but to lead them. Hyperion has an excellent position in the market, now BI and Business Performance Management start to become one single thing.

The first week of April I spent at the company's headquarters here in San Francisco. I learned an American expression that I didn't know yet: "drinking from the firehose". Whoa, does that accurately describe the feeling. There is just so much going on at the company. I also learned that in California business meetings often start at 7am already. Living in the Central European Timezone, which is 9 hours ahead of the Pacific Timezone, this is good, I get to spend time with my colleagues as of 4pm. But I don't envy them, I am not a morning person...

So if you see me walking through the hallway, and it is still early, check if I had my morning orange juice already. And at any time, please say "hi" and tell how you are doing. Solutions is not only great for Hyperion customers, to see what we're up to and learn about all the great new things first. Solutions is also great for Hyperion, as it provides the opportunity to meet so many people at one spot. I can't wait to hear your stories and drink some more from the firehose.