IT Week: As director of industry solutions for business performance management [BPM] vendor Cartesis, can you say how demand is growing?

John Taylor: No organisations are wielding blank cheque books, but most of the larger companies have a [BPM] vision in mind, even if they have not written it down formally. It might take two, five or 10 years but they are starting to do projects in terms of a roadmap, with the end goal a standardised, consistent set of systems for proactively managing their business performance. I think we will see people gain CV value too, if they can say they helped to implement an integrated BPM project.

Are your customers still worried about compliance with regulations?

Compliance hits at the core of data control and pushes examination [of it] further into the organisation. We now have a regulatory regime where financial reporting systems must be of the same industrial strength as transactional process systems. A lot of organisations met compliance requirements the first time round with temporary fixes. Now they realise the second wave is coming and that they need to do more fundamental engineering around standardisation, integrating and embedding [BPM and business intelligence] systems. I think people will do this in a more considered way and begin to address the business benefits as well.

What problems do firms have in exploiting their IT infrastructure to boost business performance?

Many of the challenges are concerned with integrating finance with the IT function. The success of BPM has actually helped here. If you went to a financial reporting conference you used to find 99 percent of the attendees were finance people, and if you went to a data warehousing or BI event, 99 percent were from IT. Now at a BPM conference both sides will be represented.

So the technology is encouraging co-operation and understanding bet ween the two sides?

Yes, as the technology solutions take shape, people on the finance side are beginning to understand the challenges from an IT infrastructure point of view and IT managers now understand issues like total cost of ownership. Finance people are even using technical terms like "proactive cacheing" as they can see how it impinges on a real business requirement that they haven't been able to meet before. As this happens, the value [of BPM] is more widely perceived.

Many vendors of business intelligence [BI] tools have spent a lot of time and cash trying to prise users away from their spreadsheets. Where do you stand on this?

Users want the best of both worlds - good data management tools, and information delivery and manipulation in Excel. Spreadsheets are no good when they are used beyond two or three people - data management, security of information and audit trails are all [lacking]. Although BI tools do some beautiful things you will never get the spreadsheet out of people's heads so we've combined the two, so you can have your cake and eat it.

About John Taylor

John Taylor is director of industry solutions for business performance management (BPM) vendor Cartesis.
He previously worked in IT consulting and was the global lead partner for PwC Consulting's software products group.