Performance Measurement/Confirmatory BI

Overview

Performance measurement focuses on evaluating the outcomes of strategic performance management initiatives. These judgments generally serve two purposes. First, they identify immediate, mid-range, and long-term trends in business outcomes (e.g. profits, customer acquisitions, retention rate, etc.). Second, they confirm or reject expected correlations between the factors which most affect leading/lagging indicator outcomes (e.g. employee training’s impact on customer retention or R&D investment on overall revenue growth).

As a result, performance measurement provides business context for BI investments, focusing attention to the measures and dimensions that matter most. This is a departure from the long-standing tradition of BI implementations that equip end-users with ad-hoc tools to surf through a morass of data to determine what’s important. In short, adopting a performance measurement mindset can simplify your business intelligence environment while simultaneously improving the business value it generates.

Technology

The core technologies for a performance measurement application involve scorecards for evaluating outcomes, analytical dashboards for reviewing trends and correlations, and OLAP to enable deeper investigation of data correlations. The Pentaho BI suite combined with JBoss Portal provides an excellent OSBI foundation for performance measurement applications. JBoss Portal provides the portal framework and functionality for dashboards and scorecards. Pentaho provides pre-built portlets and development tools to enable embedded, drillable dials, charts and reports. Pentaho Analysis Services (aka Mondrian & JPivot) enables ROLAP functionality with browser-based end user access. Finally, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services provides end-user access of the ROLAP engine directly from Excel.