I really like getting and answering questions and a reader of the book asked me a good one today

What do you see as the difference between Enterprise Decision Management and Corporate Performance Management? I don’t see you really using them interchangeably, but I sense that you see them as more or less the same thing with different areas of focus.

This is a fairly common question from people as they learn about EDM and it is easy to see why. Both focus on improving operations using analysis of data, both focus on continuous monitoring and improvement.

The difference is the difference between cockpits and dashboards. Corporate Performance Management, looking at Wikipedia’s definition, is about “Running by the numbers” because “planning, budgeting, analysis and reporting can give the measurements that empower management decisions”. Enterprise Decision Management is about going one step further and making those decisions explicit so that they can be automated and improved over time. Doing so means that business owners can’t just see and understand their business operations, they can actually change them when they need to.

I often think that Corporate Performance Management is misnamed - Corporate Performance Monitoring seems more appropriate.