| | January 20168CIOReviewopinionin myGoing full circle with Enterprise Performance ManagementBy Cameron Lackpour, Director, ODTUG here are many aphorisms that describe the cyclical nature of life: what goes around comes around; what's old is new again; there's nothing new under the sun. This analogy holds true for EPM as it has evolved from its mainframe and minicomputer origins, moved to departmental servers under someone's desk, grew to enterprise level products, and is now in the cloud. This move towards centralization and then away is the essence of EPM's circular nature.What is not cyclical is the need for data exploration, actionable information, and flexible tools that analyze and even predict business conditions that have been the requirements of businesses since the concept of commerce began. The only difference in analysis between caveman bartering and a modern corporation are its sophistication and methods because the need to interpret and understand a business' fortunes ­ good or bad ­ remains.In 1990, I started my career in a field that was then alternately called Decision Support Systems or Executive Information Systems as a very junior Comshare Commander EIS developer. For its time, Commander EIS was a revolutionary product: a graphical PC user interface before Windows, a proprietary calculation language, a data integration language eponymously called ADL, and at its heart was the System W mainframe multidimensional database. The scope and breadth of data management from sourcing to calculation to presentation set a standard that continues today for fully featured EPM product suites. Commander was also revolutionary because it gave the business the ability to analyze complex business data through direct interaction with multidimensional models using the ExecuView PC client. Yes, there was an awful lot of IT effort to build and maintain those multidimensional models just as there is today but once done, Commander users could create their own analyses without recourse to an IT report writer. Of course there were downsides: it really was extraordinarily IT centric ­ I was part of a 15 man team to support 40 users ­ database size was laughably small ­ eight dimensions with a maximum of 2,048 members across the whole database thus allowing only high level data, and from a cost perspective its mainframe platform was expensive. High license cost allied to resource intensive development and maintenance precluded wide adaptation within a corporation, hence the term Executive Information Systems. All of this was to change with the client server movement that took hold in the early 1990s. Mainframe EIS vendors facing these pressures needed to move to a more economical and flexible platform. In Comshare's case, this was accomplished through licensing Arbor Software's Essbase. I have a vivid memory of my manager tossing Essbase diskettes and manuals across his desk with the comment, "Our mainframe costs are killing me, over a million a year. Take a look at this would you?" Just as the functionality and nature of mainframe EIS products changed analysis so too did Essbase's increased functionality and reduced cost but in a different direction.The business needs were the same; my first multidimensional Essbase database was a P&L application that mirrored an existing System W model. Analytical similarities aside, what quickly became obvious were the ways that Essbase differed: a server that literally lived under my desk, a formula-centric programming language, and an TCameron Lackpour
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