Nothing drives an organization more than the processes of setting one or more pre-selected goals. The process of business performance management (BPM) focuses on three activities. These activities include the selection of business goals, consolidating measurable information relevant to those goals, and the participation of management to assist in improving future performance. This process involves the gathering of large amounts of data.

Commonly most organizations have difficulties taking the collected data and transforming it into useful information. Also many companies are trying to gather information from different sectors of their organization such as finance, inventory, forecasting, and human resources eliminating the need to use spreadsheet analysis. For reasons such as inaccurate data due to the inability to acquire timely information, decision makers are unable to correctly identify appropriate strategic actions.

Today's business intelligence solutions, like QlikView, are allowing organizations to analyze large amounts of unstructured data, quickly and flexibly. When considering a business intelligence implementation project and business performance management, management needs to consider the following:

• What are the organization's data challenges? What is the organization's vision as it is related to the data?
• What is the current data being collected and is it being measured?
• Who has a stake in the current procedures and processes? Who is going to benefit from the implementation project?
• What will the implementation and project roll out cost be including training?
• How much time will it take to implement the new software and how will it affect the organization during implementation?
• What are the performance metrics that are going to be used to measure the new data and are they industry standard?
• How often will data be collected? Hourly or possibly nightly?
• How will the data results be tested? Who will be part of the implementation and testing team?

The implementation of business intelligence does not have to be painful. QlikView is fast to implement and affordable to all organizations. Visual Data Group has a team of experts that have assisted in many implementations giving their customers the ability to measure their business performance.