This article discusses the differences between corporate performance management (CPM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions in the cloud technology era.
I have written a lot about corporate performance management (CPM) solutions. And I have also explored business intelligence (BI) tools quite a bit. You could easily argue that I seem to use the terminology interchangeably – and you wouldn’t be too far off, but there’s some method to this madness. CPM and BI both inhabit the same marketplace of enterprise technology because they do the work of summarizing the health of an organization. Pulling information from disparate sources to analyze data and crunch numbers, these two product categories enable you to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That said, there are differences, and while their end results might not appear mutually exclusive, there isn’t too much overlap. As we continue to see a migration to a new normal of cloud platforms for our enterprise technologies, it is helpful for you to understand the differences between CPM and BI, so you can deploy the right solutions to meet organizational objectives. This article will differentiate between CPM and BI tools, so you can continue to build a cloud technology roadmap with accuracy.
Let’s start with definitions. Gartner defines CPM as “an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise.” On the other hand, BI is defined as “the technology used to gather and analyze data relevant to an enterprise in order to improve business decision making.” That might sound somewhat similar to you on paper. While both terms are defined in some variety throughout the internet, maybe you can see why I might use the terms interchangeably and/or loosely. But let’s refine our understanding of the two as they differ a little further.
As a concept and a term, BI has been around longer – 1989 to be precise, while CPM came about in the early 1990s. The father of BI as he’s known, Howard Dresner, came up with the term in a move away from older decision support applications. His objective was to pinpoint in one term the practices and methodologies of making more informed business decisions via fact-based company data. Moreover, BI tasks are primarily focused on visualizations, as in dashboards of charts, scorecards, and graphs. BI isn’t just company data trends, illustrated, but also invites drill-down into numbers behind the visuals. BI can also mean big data analytics, with web site traffic and visitor behavior as one example. Generally speaking, BI is produced for the whole organization in terms of who is the audience, whereas CPM tends to zoom in on a smaller group of professionals.
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About Solver
Solver is the leading provider of complete Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions for today’s mid-market enterprise and the company is at the forefront of CPM technology with deep ERP integrations. Solver’s BI360 solution is available both as a cloud and on premise deployment and it offers powerful and intuitive modules for reporting, budgeting, dashboards and data warehousing. www.solverglobal.com
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