Sorry about the dry title, what can I say? Am just trying to optimise my lil' blog a bit, God knows I need the hits. Anyway, am in sunny Sweden at the moment hearing all about SAS and its shiny shiny performance management solutions. At least, that's what I thought I was coming for - apart from what my taxi driver referred to as 'Stockholm skirt' - but on the first day it seemed like SAS was almost going out of its way not to mention BI. Apart from an all too brief spell when SAS chief Jim Goodnight shuffled tentatively on from stage right, the keynote talk was all management theory, economic predictions and guru-speak, which is not really my, erm, bag. I'm assuming the 1400-odd European C-level execs the event was tailored for found it a bit more enlightening.

In the end then not an awful lot of BI, which to be honest is not always a bad thing, but quite a lot about what a crackin' company SAS is to work for (don't rub it in guys, I'm a journalist for God's sake). But that said, there was some good insight into what makes a successful BPM (or CPM or whatever you want to call it) project. It all sounds like obvious stuff, but things like executive buy-in, data quality, enterprise-wide deployment etc are probably neglected by many firms keen to jump on the performance management bandwagon because their competitors have.