JT on EDM

This week’s editorial calendar is about using Enterprise Decision Management – EDM – to survive and thrive in a recession. Prompted by a comment from Nathan Jones, the topic seems appropriate as everyone flails around trying to decide if they should use the “r” word or not. Clearly, whether we meet the definition of a recession or not, we are in a down turn. Cost control and not growth and investment will be the focus for most organizations. If one believes, as I do, that EDM is good business, then investing in EDM should help even in a recession. But how exactly?

I started off by reading a few posts on recession planning. For instance, Brenda Michelson had a post in which she described the “first reaction to a downturn is cost-cutting and a myopic focus on keeping the lights on” and linked to this post by Tammy Erickson on Recession 2008: Take the Offensive where Tammy discusses various approaches to making an organization “more spontaneous, innovative and reflexive”. Both Brenda and Tammy are making the point that a cost-cutting approach may not work best, even in a recession. Managing in a downtown by Ron Dimon proposed that performance management technology can help because it let’s you see what will actually help – is it more realistic to grow revenue or cut costs, for instance? Are there areas with costs out of proportion to other parts of your business and so on. Like Tammy,he is suggesting that blind cost cutting may not be the only or best response to a recession. In contrast, A Primer for Surviving a Recession by Pui-Wing Tam has some suggestions for CIOs that were pretty much focused on cost cutting – what you would expect in terms of things to cut/delay to save costs. Clearly some CIOs will be told to cut costs by the CEO regardless but let’s assume here that most companies are interested in doing better overall even if that means cutting some costs while investing elsewhere.

Assuming, then, a reasonably holistic approach on the part of the organization as a whole, how can enterprise decision management help you cope in a recession. To answer this I am to write a series of posts:

• Using EDM to reduce and control business costs
• Using EDM to effectively allocate resources
• Using EDM and adaptive control to respond to uncertainty
• Reducing fixed IT costs with EDM
• How to prioritize the use of EDM in a recession