Read my latest blog post here: http://goo.gl/cr2igq

If you often ask yourself this question I sincerely hope that it's in a positive spirit: How is Business doing today? Compared to Prior Year, Forecast or Industry Benchmarks. By market, customer, portfolio, territory.

If these are the instant answers you get you should be quite satisfied and you can stop reading.

However, if instead the answers you're getting involve things like Performance issues, Restatements, Reconciliation Differences, Major Upgrade Project or Integration Issues then you might want to continue reading.

Because these are fairly good indicators that instead of providing you with the right decision support, your Corporate Performance Management (CPM) tool is about to give in on one or more of the typical CPM diseases:

• Your numbers are in the system but reporting comes out of Excel. And it turns out to be heavily dependent on the one guy (M/F) that held that position until last month. In other words: the new guy has no clue what the previous one did.
• Your CPM tool is hijacked by the organization and turned into the company's jukebox that's supposed to play everybody's tune.
• Your Admin team seems to resist any new technology. Why? Shouldn't they of all people should be triggered by new technology? Yeah, but as it turns out their biggest fear is that new technology forces them to upgrade your CPM-tool. And despite what the sales guys told you, that is 'a Biggy'.
• All your attempts to deliver results faster fail on Intercompany. Because ICP are matched in your CPM and not properly reconciled in local ledgers before the end of the month

I could go on a while but you probably see where I'm going. And usually it's not your Admin that is to blame for the mess. It's usually a blend of too many chiefs in the kitchen, Admins in a limbo to do what they believe is right, and vendors complicating their product offering for each new release.

In the series of blogs that I have in mind I hope to address these issues as well as other topics that are typical for the CPM environment. Based on my 15+ years of experience in the area, both in small fast moving organizations and in huge global corporations, I'm hoping to share my learnings with you.

Why that might be of interest for you? Perhaps because I lived through most of these pains and found solutions: By setting clear governance or by aligning management around the issues and creating awareness. And sometimes it's as simple as telling the Admins to be less nice…

IdeaMakery don't believe in template approaches; Your situation is unique to us and we won't recommend a best practice until we truly understand your business. We will pick up on signals from your organization and give you our interpretation. All to have the right dialogue with you, the owner of the corporate CPM platform.

I hope you will tune in for my series of blogs.