News

New IBM Portal Focuses on Strategy Execution

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• September 19, 2005

IBM recently released a beta of an executive portal called IBM Workplace for Business Strategy Execution, which allows executives and other members of an organization to monitor their own goals and objectives, link objectives to others in the company, and explain how one objective relates to an organization’s overall strategy.

The portal features customizable scorecards for executives to track corporate objectives over the long term. Users can also create team spaces to communicate across the company, as well as to contact each other via instant messaging. Any changes made cascade through the entire portal.

Scorecards can be based on different perspectives, such as financial (revenue goals and gross profits), customer-focused (market share), internal business processes (Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and new patents) and learning and growth. If a problem crops up, such as a low-performing sales area, executives receive an alert. They examine status maps of these linked objectives and initiatives to understand what areas need attention. They also can collaborate with other business managers to plan to get a particular business strategy back on track.

Other alerts in the scorecard include status change, approval notices and items requiring user interaction.

For security, administrators control which perspectives are available to users when they create an objective. Administrators can change an objective’s related settings, such as the currency type used in monetary calculations.

Workplace for Business Strategy Execution is built on top of Workplace Services Express, a portal that features collaboration tools and document management capability so employees can share information and applications.

Workplace for Business Strategy’s release is set for mid-October; pricing will be less than $1,000 per user and less than $1,000 per server.