Not just cubes
Business optimisation and accountability are among the big issues which have continued to pump life into the data query, analysis and reporting software genre. It has in the past been called the Executive Information System, the “everybody information system” (when it was realised that not just top management could benefit from a digested view of the organisation’s performance) and, in one of its most recent incarnations, Business Intelligence.
The latest use to which analysis software has been put is Business Performance Management or, as Gartner prefers to call it, Corporate Performance Management (CPM). But it’s more than just the same thing under a different name. Previous analytical engines resided in something of a compartment of their own. The data from the company’s day-to-day operations was piped into them by a process known as Extract Transform and Load (ETL) and reorganised into “cubes”, a suitable format for cross-tabulating and graphing the data on multiple axes.