The ESM team is pleased to officially announce the forthcoming ESM 5.0 Beta release in Q1 2009. Thank you to all the past and present clients over the past 8 years for your feedback on how to make the ESM as user friendly and effective as a meeting mangement solution as possible.

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The ESM is the only application that has the core meeting view interface to present the right level of strategic information to leadership. At the end of the day effective strategic decision making is at the heart of what organizations are trying to achieve. In our new 5.0 release, we are really expanding on the features of Meeting View and making the entire application just as meeting friendly. Although the release dates have yet to be finalized, expect a beta version of ESM 5.0 late this year and the full release in early 2009. Find a partial list of the new 5.0 enhancements after the jump.

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Palladium Announces XPA™--Execution Premium Assessment--based on the Kaplan-Norton Strategic Management System

New Tool and Book Based on Close Collaboration between Palladium, Kaplan, and Norton

Palladium Group Inc., the global market leader helping organizations execute their strategies, has announced the Execution Premium Assessment (XPA), the newest offering designed to help companies understand the strategic performance gap between where they are and where they want to be. XPA, the latest tool in an integrated suite from Palladium, is based on more than fifteen years of research by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the world's preeminent authorities on strategic performance management, and the best practices of more than 100 high performing organizations.

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For those of you who receive Gartner research, you should give "Using Corporate Performance Management to Deliver the CEO's Strategic Vision" a quick read (30 April 2008, ID Number G00157458). The key take away point I found in the article is that operational management is a lot better managed than strategy management in organizations today. Most readers cannot argue with that point. In support of that hypothesis, I've found in my work that there is a greater level of comfort around the operations; it is thought of as more tangible, easier to understand, discuss, and report.

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I've been watching the first few days of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in awe of all the world records that are being broken. Just last night the US men's relay swim team "smashed" the previous world record by several seconds, in a sport where tenths of seconds are a long time. It's fitting that come August 2008 when the Olympics are in full swing, the Executive Strategy Manager is posting a record performance of its own.

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Performance is big to us. We're constantly striving to enhance the performance of the application in any way that we can, because we know how frustrating it can be trying to use a slow website. That's why we were so excited to finally be perusing a partnership with Akamai to help deliver our application to the far reaches of the globe. Don't get me wrong, we've always had very good performance and very good global coverage, but there are a few spots around the world that saw excessive latency and delays that were out of our control.

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The ESM has completed the much anticipated partnership with Akamai Technologies to provide a truly global acceleration of the ESM. Over the next few days we anticipate a 50 -80% or greater speed improvement of the ESM suite of tools, allowing us to reach our clients around the globe at record breaking speeds.

Everyone Benefits

Whether you are an Employee in our Lincoln, MA. USA office or a client halfway around the globe the ESM performance is now equally the same. Akamai route optimization and cache servers work 24x7X365 to identify the best route from your laptop to our ESM servers. There will be no more waiting for content to load as one navigates through Measures and Objectives in meeting view.

The ESM is now 100% globally-distributed using the Akamai EdgePlatform that continuously pulls and caches fresh content onto strategically positioned servers that are closer to our customers. A dynamic mapping system directs user requests for ESM content to an optimal Akamai edge server. Then, through route optimization Akamai identifies the fastest, most reliable path back to your data center to retrieve ESM content. Several connection techniques are in place to optimize communications between the Akamai edge server and the ESM infrastructure to deliver dynamic content to our clients over optimized connections that avoid Internet problem spots.

What to expect

• Much faster ESM performance worldwide.
• Capacity scaling on demand allowing the ESM to meet critical demand.
• Increased availability through uninterrupted service capability.

The quality of the ESM service will not diminish as the ESM continues to rapidly grow it's customer base. The Akamai EdgePlatform scales as the demand increases. That flexibility frees the ESM to allow you to truly execute on the strategy execution premium.

Stay tuned for future enhancements.

I was speaking with an ESM client manager yesterday and she mentioned to me that she just changed jobs. She had been an ESM manager (part of an Office of Strategy Management) in a different organization and leveraged her expertise on the application and best practice reporting methodology that the ESM supports to secure this new position.

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The Executive Strategy Manager will soon be home to a completely refreshed list of objectives and measures from which our users will be able to sort by both perspective and industry (and sometimes function) to get a list of potentials for their own scorecard.

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After nearly 10 years in the strategy space certifying many of the big name business intelligence software vendors out there for their Balanced Scorecard module (meaning that their business performance management software meets the minimum standards for building and managing scorecards), I've formulated a concrete opinion on how most differ from the Executive Strategy Manager. I've seen cases where both types of applications are needed, neither is needed, and just one will meet the needs of the organization.

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We are looking at another successful day at the CMA conference in blistery cold Toronto. I fielded some interesting questions around the ESM capabilities, especially when it came to forecasting and hypothetical scenario planning.

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