By Aditya Padha ’96

One of the most important responsibilities a corporate executive has today is to use his or her insight to improve the performance of his or her business. Many people have written books sharing their philosophies about achieving excellence. After reading such a book, executives will often try to emulate the best practices of other organizations, with varying degrees of success. The problem is that achieving excellence in one’s business is not as simple as, say, baking a cake. To bake a successful cake, one simply needs to read the cookbook and follow the directions. Achieving excellence in one’s business is not so simple; there is no one strategy, no simple cookbook of directions, which provides the right solutions for every business.

Organizations in pursuit of excellence need to measure and manage performance in order to define and meet their goals. Information technology can (and should) provide your business with important tools to make this task simpler and more effective. Businesses today often end up measuring and managing performance in a piecemeal fashion via a myriad of disparate business applications. More often than not, they fail to meet their goals since performance is usually being measured after the fact. In today’s digital economy, businesses need to ensure that the entire organization is aligned with its strategic goals, while departments manage their goals at a tactical level. This is best achieved through a holistic corporate management approach called “enterprise performance management.”

Enterprise performance management, or EPM, is a strategic approach to answering the fundamental business question, “What is the state of my business today?” EPM aligns business intelligence, metrics and initiatives to optimize business processes. It emphasizes the use of metrics and business intelligence reporting to monitor and manage business executives from the executive to individual contributor level. You can use EPM strategies across departments by connecting goals to metrics to people.

Here’s how EPM works: during the budgeting and goal-setting cycle, high-level financial goals are set, and those goals are efficiently cascaded down the organization. All parts of the organization must work effectively in tandem to achieve their corporate goals. In the past decade, many businesses have begun using EPM to better integrate their financial planning, reporting and management functions. This ensures coordinated, seamless and resultsoriented management across all of an organization’s operating divisions. It is a proactive rather than reactive way to manage, and gives managers time to adjust their department’s activities to meet problems head-on. It is crucial to have a robust business intelligence platform to provide the decision support and reporting capabilities needed for a single enterprise view—a dashboard view, if you will—of your organization. Business intelligence platforms are expensive but well worth the investment because of the benefits they provide. These benefits include:

• Improved reporting and analysis—a robust reporting solution provides dynamic reporting to support better resource allocation and decisionmaking.

• More accurate and timely decision making, by putting information into the hands of employees who can increase the company’s profits when and where they need it.

• Smarter operational plans, because the underlying information is accurate and easily accessible.

• Faster and more cross-functional decisionmaking, because actionable information is available enterprise-wide, allowing for a greater level of precision.

• Accurate measures of profitability —more important now than ever—at a transaction level by such very specific measures as product, customer, channel, route, or sales executive.

• The ability to react quickly to changes in performance metrics, allowing executives to effectively manage at both macro- and microlevels.

• Reduced costs, improved processes, better reporting capabilities and improved customer service.

Achieving corporate excellence requires a precise understanding of the interaction between different departments within an organization. By having a robust business intelligence solution that provides a “single enterprise view,” organizations can dynamically adapt to changing business models and improve their own performances through an efficient collaboration of people, process and technology.

Adi Padha is a chief technology officer in BearingPoint’s (formerly KPMG Consulting) health services sector. In his present role, as the Chief Technology Officer for one of the largest federal sectors, he is responsible for introducing programs, IT models and methods to reengineer and reposition existing processes, enhance systems and align human resources to accelerate growth within target markets. He is also responsible for servicing and managing clients in the healthcare sector on large technology initiatives. Padha has over 13 years of experience in management, strategy and decision support consulting. He has significant industry knowledge and client delivery experience in enterprise application integration (EAI), data warehousing/ metadata and repository management, and knowledge management (KM).