CPM Trends for 2014 from Gartner’s BI & Analytics Summit

It’s been a really valuable couple of days here at the Gartner BI & Analytics Summit 2014 in Las Vegas, particularly because of the new info they presented on CPM. On Sunday I attended a session delivered by Gartner’s Chris Iervolino and John Van Decker on “The Fundamentals of Corporate Performance Management”. Here are some of my takeaways:

• Key trends influencing CPM include…
• Need for organization-wide planning
• Desire for greater industry / vertical specialization
• More real-time gathering of and reporting on data (i.e., involving operational groups vs. the office-of-finance)
• The ability to leverage a common platform across all elements of CPM (financial consolidation & close, financial management reporting and disclosure, budgeting, strategic planning and forecasting, profitability modeling and optimization) is crucial
• The CPM market, which they estimate to be $2.5B globally, continues to grow at a rate higher than the software market in general

The Fundamentals session was followed up the next day with another presentation by Chris and John on “Engaging your CFO in Business Analytics”. Again, they raised several new points related to CPM, including the latest data from a joint annual survey they conduct with FEI (Financial Executives International) on financial executives’ influence on IT / technology decisions and their related priorities.

Some of the specific data points they raised:

• CFO influence over IT decisions continues to grow (a 44% increase over 2 years ago)
• CFOs want to enhance analytics related to transparency and decision making
• Cloud is top of mind. “Hybrid Cloud”, where certain elements of CPM remain on-premise and others live in the cloud, represents an important, growing strategy

In both sessions they talked about the “Nexus of Forces” affecting CPM, the convergence of which will be disruptive. This disruption will create new opportunities for CPM process innovation.

The nexus of forces is composed of the following:

• Mobile
• Cloud
• Social
• Information (expanded data access and integration)

It was interesting to see that CPM was not part of the Gartner Magic Quadrant review panel, which focused instead on BI analytics platforms, data warehouse and database management systems, and, new this year, Advanced Analytics. In talking to John Van Decker the next day, he did point out that this event is largely IT-centric, whereas CPM is primarily focused on the CFO and senior finance staff.

With that said, the event ultimately left me with a positive view of the opportunities for CPM in the years ahead. Our market space continues to see healthy growth. Senior finance execs have also demonstrated a keen interest in leveraging CPM to bring together operational and strategic planning.