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Taking time to smell the roses….

​”a rose by any other name…”

Shakespeare worked hard to convince us that no matter the name, a rose always smells sweet. The problem is that you have  to get close to the flower to tell that it has a sweet smell. If you walked past a red flower and someone told you to “look at that aphid feast”, you are less likely to walk over, stick your nose deep in and sniff to discover the sweet smell.

Getting someone to pause and take time to understand what your software does is a common roadblock for new software.   You may be a rose, but you need them to stop long enough to sniff. After spending some time at HP Discover this week, it became apparent that they have an unrecognized rose.

Around 2 years ago, HP released their new Executive Scorecard software. There was a big sales promotion, lots of customers bought it, but only a fraction have implemented it fully- mostly because apparently no one was certain what the value add was.  Some of the folks I talked to called it “HP’s best kept Software Secret”, others told me it was Shelfware, but seemed eager to learn how to leverage it.

Considering only the name, you may think to yourself  “scorecard=high level metric dashboard”. While there is a reporting level with hundreds of built in KPIs, when I paused and took a closer look it was apparent that HP has a gem of a tool buried under mis-naming and marketing pains.

Executive scorecard is more of analytics/modeling platform than a scorecard. While it does have a nice reporting surface with infrastructure easily wired to tie objectives to KPIs, underneath it is a data consolidation/ modeling platform with a capability to build and test scenarios.  It comes with Cloud Analytics and ITFM (IT Financial Management) modules out of the box (although they can be customized to fit your particular processes/infrastructure), but you could model and report on almost any scenario that your business needs to solve.

If you are in the market for Cloud Analytics or a Corporate ITFM solution, you should add it to the list of applications you evaluate. Thavron is also planning on adding it into our toolset of solutions for many of the Service Lifecycle projects we tackle, giving our customers the power to model alternate solutions and adding to their power to make Data Driven Decisions.