Reading up on projects involving Business Intelligence (BI) I found an excellent Intelligent Enterprise article, “The Seven Pillars of BI Success”. What I am finding is a remarkable similarity between PMOs and their governance models and BI. This is because BI deals with centralizing information control that has been decentralized by department (silos) and many non-integrated systems with no strategic alignment process; this is similar to the problem that PMOs address in terms of project control. Centralizing both, in the right way, can pay off tremendously in reduced resource requirements for IT and projects (that can now be focused on …read more

The way it is being touted in the press you would think that the BI related Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) is the latest new approach to managing business performance. In fact SOP is close to a 40 year old business process that allows aggregate planning to be assessed and passed down to specific finished goods planned in manufacturing companies. The early forms used planning bills of material and rough cut profiles in Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII) systems to generate top down plans and bottom up assessment of performance. This along with excellent master scheduling business processes were best practices …read more