For most organisations corporate performance management (CPM) is the main priority in business intelligence (BI), according to a recent Gartner survey. The survey was based on 609 attendants at the Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes, November 2007.

Two-thirds of the respondents, who were from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, rated CPM as the top issue in BI rather than data warehousing and data quality.

“BI needs to transition from measuring performance to proactively managing performance to achieve business goals and a key enabler of this transition is CPM,” said Nigel Rayner, Gartner research vice presidentadding. “CPM includes metrics, methodologies, processes and systems used to manage performance targeted at the corporate level.”

Rayner explained that many organisations underestimate the capabilities of CPM applications. "As most business users are transitioning from legacy, manual and spreadsheet-based systems, they lack the knowledge of what these advanced applications can do and how they should be deployed,” he added.

The Gartner report said the problem is most organisations simply automate existing finance-oriented processes and this does not help performance management structures across the rest of the organisation. Although Rayner added that this also means an attractive untapped market for software vendors.

To implement CPM successfully, a project will need an equal partnership between finance, IT and key business users, said Gartner.