The Performance Management Revolution

Chapter 7. Build an EPM Center of Excellence

In working to find business solutions, IT and business groups within an organization share common goals, yet their approaches are often so independent of each other that they may be working at cross‐purposes. IT managers might focus on architecture, function, and standards, but lack any real understanding of what business users do. Business managers and analysts might understand the business need, but do not have the technical background to develop solutions that support it.

Finding common ground for IT and business is the concept behind an EPM Center of Excellence, which is an organization that defines, refines, documents, and promotes best practices an organization will use to deploy EPM.

Why You Need a Center of Excellence

Centers of Excellence are frequently implemented in IT environments to help organizations implement a variety of technologies, including data warehousing, BI, and the applications of assorted vendors. What these implementations have in common is the creation of a central repository of knowledge, experience, and best practices, and a big picture perspective that can assist others in an organization with similar deployments.

In a similar way, an EPM Center of Excellence can provide these and other benefits to an organization for managing business performance. It should be kept in mind, however, that some of these benefits take longer to realize than others. This is because organizations typically have a burning issue that ...