The Performance Ideas Blog in 2011
2011 was a great year for the Performance Idea blog. I personally really enjoyed developing this site. Writing a blog definitely requires a lot of effort, patience and sometimes sacrifice. I usually ended up writing most of the articles at night or on airplanes. In early August, I realized that the wordpress.com platform was getting a bit too restrictive and I ended up migrating to a self-hosted format. That was a good move but it took a few weekends.
Some people have recently asked me whether it’s been worth the effort. The answer is: YES. The positive feedback I have received from you has been tremendous and I really appreciate that! But let’s look back. Here is some noteworthy content.
TOP CONTENT 2011
When you look at the most popular articles for 2011, there are two clear trends: Topics like mobile BI, dashboarding and forecasting are hot. Here are the top five posts:
- The new IBM Cognos Mobile iPad app is nice!
- What’s happening in the IBM Labs? The BA Forum keynote (Day 2)
- The ultimate rolling forecast workshop
- How to build offline management dashboards
- Business Analytics and the Innovator’s DNA
- What photography taught me about dashboards
POLARIZING POSTS
Budgeting and forecasting topics tend to invoke strong feelings. You can sometimes see it in the comments on this blog. Other times I received a lot of direct responses and replies in certain discussion groups. These four posts definitely belong to that ‘polarize me‘ category:
- Annual Budgeting – Our favorite season?
- A few thoughts about planning
- An imaginary interview with weather frog Franz
- The battle hymn of the tiger manager
INTERVIEWS
Over the past twelve months I was also lucky to interview a few really smart people. Those interviews also seemed to hit a spot.
- A conversation with the ‘King of KPIs’ – David Parmenter
- Future Ready? A discussion with Steve Morlidge
- Success with Forecasting – An interview with Pieter Coens
GUEST POSTS
The guest posts also proved to be quite popular. I am really grateful for the great content by Mark Jeffries, Erwin Boeren and Mike Duncan.I am definitely planning on doing more next year (please raise your hand if you are interested in sharing some content on this blog!).
- Open Pages and the convergence of Performance Management by Erwin Boeren
- Dashboarding insights by Mike Duncan (along with a few other great posts)
- Have you invested in yourself? by Mark Jeffries
PERSONAL FAVORITES
Do I have any favorites? Yes, for sure. Some articles were super fun to write. These were my favorites:
- Vision with short-term thinking?
- A simply awesome idea for your projects
- How to present numbers more effectively
2012 will be an extremely interesting and fun year. Trust me. I have that certain feeling. There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in this market space.
As always, please let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.