In de nieuwe Journal of Management Excellence (issue #4) van Oracle is een artikel van Centraal Boekhuis opgenomen. In deze uitgave van februari staan zeer interessante artikelen die ingaan op de waardecreatie van Business Intelligence. Ik vind het persoonlijk altijd zeer interessant te denken in de context van informatieproducten met bijbehorende toegevoegde waarde, waarbinnen ik BI oplossingen positioneer. Hieronder een woord van de editor Frank Buytendijk. Klik hier om het volledige journal te downloaden.

Creating value is the most important objective of every organization, but it is also the hardest to define. Creating shareholder value is perhaps the most tangible way of looking at value creation. We can look at the market capitalization, net present value of expected dividend streams, and the share price. Maybe the fact that it is relatively easy to measure and calculate shareholder value has been an important reason behind the popularity of the concept. But because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean that it is the right measure of success.

I’ve come to think of creating value as the role an organization plays within its performance network. For me, an organization is a unique collaboration between stakeholders who realize that individual goals can only be reached by working together. One of the articles in this issue defines the True Value Index, a measure that takes such collaboration into account. Regardless of whether you believe in stakeholder value or shareholder value, you probably agree that profit is important for any commercial organization. It is the oxygen of a company; it keeps the organization alive and allows it to sustain and grow. In today’s market, there is particularly heightened interest in managing profitability, and VJ Lal’s article sheds some light on how this works.

To understand profitability—or any other key performance indicator—a good enterprise performance management (EPM) system is required to obtain the right data, to distribute the correct information to the right people, and to analyze the results. Ivo Bauermann describes what an EPM system needs to look like to be up to the task. James Taylor warns against the opposite effect. We should avoid the overinstrumented enterprise, otherwise we only keep track of the score instead of focusing on the actual game—running a business. This Journal also includes an interesting case study that, coincidentally, comes from my home country, The Netherlands. Centraal Boekhuis is the main logistics provider for the local book publishing industry. It uses business intelligence (BI) not only to support management decision-making and reporting, but also to share information with stakeholders. In fact, information is a service that Centraal Boekhuis sells. In this case, BI creates value very directly.

As with our previous topic (Organizing for Management Excellence), we will devote two issues to the subject of creating value. Please contact me to submit an article for the next Journal. In the meantime, download the Journal here.