Whatever terms you want to use, companies are gradually moving toward global strategies that combine traditional business intelligence with more financially-oriented applications such as planning, budgeting, and consolidation.
On the one hand, this is great news (CFOs hold the purse-strings, after all), but CFOs aren’t necessarily the group that are most eager for wider information access.
According to an IDC study a few years ago, most of the ROI from BI projects arises from business units discovering new revenue opportunities and new ways of working. But according to Forrester, via Search CIO:
"True to the hellish stereotype, CIOs who report to the CFO spend more time than their peers on cost cutting and focus the least on improving the business. They had the smallest budgets as a percentage of revenue (4.2%). They scored low on centralized vendor management and performance management…."
So while combining BI and performance management can help the overall project be more visible and strategic (and hence more likely to be successful), care should be taken to make sure that the BI part of the projects are not overlooked when the chief sponsor is the CFO…
In general, teams implementing global BI and performance management strategies need to carefully consider their "marketing" strategy internally, with different approaches for different audiences in order to maximize deployment success…