Videoblog on strategy, organizational behavior and performance management

Frank Buytendijk writes a nice blog on performance management at Oracle's corporate blog. I enjoy reading his posts, he knows deeply about the subject and writes clearly and concisely. Recently, he started a videoblog on strategy, organizational behavior and performance management. At the moment, he already published 4 videos: Best Practices, Return on IT, Book Review 1 and Dealing with Dilemmas.

That is a good initiative by Frank. Watch and enjoy!

Below is the first videoblog: Best Practices



Frank Buytendijk wrote a very good book called Performance Leadership. He is writing a new book entitled Dealing with Dilemmas: Where Business Analytics Fall Short (The book is on pre-order at Amazon.com. He commented about the book in the videoblog Dealing with Dilemmas).

Business Transformation

Oracle published this month their Journal of Management Excellence, with the title Business Transformation. "Slowly but surely we are expanding the scope of the Journal of Management Excellence. In this issue, we discuss “business transformation”. Business transformation has many different facets, and we discuss a number of them", Frank Buytendijk said, in the Letter from the Editor. Frank also introduced the new editor Toby Hatch, who will drive the next phase of maturity for the Journal of Management Excellence.

As always, this issue has several good articles:
- Business Innovation: The CIO Perspective - Thomas Oestreich
- Re-Learning the ROPES - Kevin Narain
- Transforming Your Risk and Performance Management - Brian Gregory
- Transforming the Business for Success - Kathy Horton
- Can Value Chain Analysis lead to Business Transformation? - William Stratton
- Transforming Business Success Through the Implementation of A Performance Architecture - Jim Gurowka
- IT Complexity and Business Transformation: Turning Ideas Into Innovation - Sandeep Banerjie
- Industry Insights - Mark Conway

About the articles, Frank said: "It seems to me, looking at all the articles, that business transformation itself has transformed over the years. Gone are the days of reengineering the complete business in a big bang project style. Business transformation today is a series of smaller steps, gradually and in a controlled way leading to a new desired state. Most transformation is driven by the external world, by political, economical, social, technological, environmental and legal change. These external forces change, and it is not always possible to drive them yourself. Agility is the key to successful business transformation. The goal may be clear, the grand vision may still stand, but the way is continuously reevaluated."

You can access the previous issues of the Journal of Management Excellence in the Oracle site.

Journal of Management Excellence Issue 6: Building Trust

Frank Buytendijk announced in his Oracle's blog that the Journal of Management Excellence Issue 6 is out, with the title Building Trust.

In the Letter from the Editor, Frank wrote: "You could reason that the current economic crisis was actually caused by performance management. I realize that this is a provocative statement - but think about it. Many commentators highlighted the fact that bankers were given large bonuses based on the revenue they brought in by taking big risks. Linking incentives to targets is a performance management ‘best practice’. These same commentators pointed out that financial institutions often didn’t really understand the risk profile of the subprime mortgage packages that they bought, reshuffled into different packages, and sold. The risk calculations were based on very complex and advanced analytics; which are also part of performance management. Lastly, many organizations felt safe because they were ‘compliant with regulations’ and did all the necessary reporting. Obviously, ‘accountability’ (a large driver of performance management) was not enough. Hence, my harsh statement that performance management caused the current crisis.

So what’s the good news? I think performance management will play a leading role in weathering and solving the crisis too. The economy, despite all the mathematics, in the end is a social science and is influenced by human behavior. What was damaged the most in the beginning of the recession was ‘trust’. Financial institutions trusted the mathematical models too much. When the economy collapsed, the banks didn’t trust each other anymore. This impacted consumer confidence and trust, and the financial crisis impacted the real economy.

Rebuilding trust is the key to ending the recession. Consumers must regain trust to buy houses and cars again, which will fuel the real economy and restore the financial system. The path to trust is transparency; which is exactly what organizations should invest in."

This issue has many interesting articles:
- Trust, Relationships and Performance by Frank Buytendijk, Oracle Vice President and Fellow, Enterprise Performance Management.
- High-trust Companies Equal High-profit Companies by Claire Carradice, Service Excellence Operations Analyst Siemens IT Solutions and Services
- Enhancing Partnership Trust with Collaborative Performance Scorecarding by Mike Haley, President, Landmark Decisions and Toby Hatch, Oracle Senior Strategist
- Sustainability Results That Build Trust and Improve the Bottom Line by Angela Enyeart, Oracle Director, Sustainability Intelligence Product Strategy
- Transitioning to IFRS: What’s Your Roadmap? by John O’Rourke, Oracle Vice President BI and EPM Product Marketing
- Building Trust With an End-to-End Approach to Financial Reporting and Compliance by Mike Malwitz, Oracle Director, Product Strategy
- Managing Reputation Risk by Thomas Oestreich, Oracle Chief EPM Strategist
- Industry Insights by Mark Conway, Oracle Director, BI Product Marketing

The Journal of Management Excellence is a very good reference on Performance Management, provided by Oracle. The previous issues also can be downloaded.

EPM.TV, the new site with Performance Management content

EPM.TV is a very nice initiative created by the Oracle's EPM experts Frank Buytendijk and Thomas Oestreich, to share and publicize content about Enterprise Performance Management and Management Excellence. According to the welcome message: "the site that will completely change the way you look at managing your business."

They separate the issues by topic: EPM TV, Social Media, EPM index, Resource Centre and Events.

In the topic of EPM TV, you can watch videos with presentations, debates and interviews. In the Resource Centre has whitepapers, journals and customer case studies to download. According the site, the EPM Index is where "the businesses in Europe and North America are assessed on their ability to unite management processes and information systems to form a consolidated view of the business. The research for the EPM Index was conducted by analyst group Quocirca, and asked 800 business decision-makers in Europe and North America to rank their organisations on the processes and accuracy of information governing six distinct areas: the stakeholder environment, market model, business model, business plan, business operations and business results."

You need to make a free registration to access the EPM.TV content.

Journal of Management Excellence #4 is out

Frank Buytendijk commented in his Oracle's blog that the new issue of Journal of Management Excellence is out. The title is Creating Value.

Frank said: "Creating value is the most important objective of every organization, but it is also the hardest to define. Creating shareholder value is perhaps the most tangible way of looking at value creation. We can look at the market capitalization, net present value of expected dividend streams, and the share price. Maybe the fact that it is relatively easy to measure and calculate shareholder value has been an important reason behind the popularity of the concept. But because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean that it is the right measure of success."

There are several interesting texts and commentaries in this issue:
- Connect Enterprise Performance Management Processes to Drive Business Value - Ivo Bauermann, Senior Director, Business Development, EPM
- Commentary: If You Are Ready, Now Is the Time! - John Kopcke, Senior Vice President, EPM
- The Need for Profitability Management - VJ Lal,Director, Product Strategy, EPM
- Commentary: The Complete Value of an Enterprise Performance Management System -Thomas Oestreich, Chief EPM Strategist
- Centraal Boekhuis: Creating Value by Delivering Business Intelligence as a Service - Emiel van Bockel, Manager Information Services, Centraal Boekhuis
- Guest Commentary: The Overinstrumented Enterprise - James Taylor, CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions and co-author of Smart (Enough) Systems
- True Value Index: A Measure for Sustainable Business Success - Frank Buytendijk, Vice President and Fellow, EPM
- Industry Insights - Mark Conway, Director, EPM Alliances and Research

The Journal of Management Excellence is a nice initiative from Oracle, where they are publishing very good materials about Business Intelligence and Performance Management.

Management Excellence

In July of this year, Frank Buytendijk introduced the concept of Management Excellence in his Oracle's blog and launched The Journal of Management Excellence.

He wrote: "Organizations should recognize that the competitive differentiation of operational excellence is diminishing, and that a new competitive wave has started. Organizations should extend their focus on cost, quality and speed, to including being smart, agile and aligned.

Creating management excellence is the goal of performance management.

Management Excellence is going to be a very important theme for Oracle EPM the coming year."

In October, he launched the issue #2 of The Journal of Management Excellence, with a very nice article about the Office of Strategy Management by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

Today he posted a link to download four white papers about Management Excellence:
• “Management Excellence: How Tomorrow’s Leaders Will Get Ahead” introduces what management excellence means, and describes the Oracle management process framework called Strategy to Success (S2S)
• “Management Excellence: The Metrics Reloaded” discusses the performance indicators that organizations should focus on when they adopt Strategy to Success
• “Management Excellence: From Strategy to Success” details the S2S processes and introduces a blueprint to map your own management processes
• “Management Excellence: Techniques and Technologies” highlights important techniques that an EPM System must offer in order to support Strategy to Success.

Oracle is doing a great work and those are excellent materials about Management Excellence.

Frank Buytendijk announces his book called Performance Leadership

Frank Buytendijk announced yesterday, in his blog, that his book called Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders, and Lead Your Industry to came out.

It is a good news, because Frank is an experienced professional, and knows Performance Management deeply. He is Oracle's Vice President of EPM Strategy, and always writes good posts in his blog.

It is interesting how he announced the book, starting with the title of the post: Performance comes from Venus, Management from Mars. He described: "Performance has everything to do with passion, motivation, dedication, skills, teamwork. Performance is about People. Management is all about control, procedures, guidelines and regulations. Management is about processes and systems. In other words, Performance comes from Venus, and Management from Mars.

Seen this way, ‘performance management’ is a bit of a contradiction in terms. I have been exploring this idea for the last three years, and many of the posts in this blog have been inspired by this journey. And this journey has had a deliverable that I am very proud of…"

I am anxious to read this book.