Enabling a Successful Center of Excellence

As many of you know, IBM’s TM1® is one of the fastest and most versatile IT platforms in the world. No, I am not exaggerating – in fact, that statement has been true for 30+ years!

Cubewise’s global mission is about empowering everyone engaged with TM1 – developers, modelers, administrators, contributors and consumers – to maximize their business impact and potential, and to fully leverage the investments their company has made in TM1 software, hardware, development and training.

Our goal is to help your business gain competitive advantage, increase profitability and market share, reduce risk, and a plethora of other benefits that come once you break free of the constraints imposed by spreadsheets and other sub-optimal tools… AND are using TM1 effectively.

The best way we know to achieve these desired outcomes is by:

• Implementing Cubewise’s Pulse for TM1 (if you are reading this, you may already be familiar with Pulse’s many features and benefits)
• Building a TM1 Center of Excellence, using Pulse as the “mortar”

A Center of Excellence (COE for short, also known in some places as a Competency Center) is partly theoretical (e.g. “Best Practices in Performance Management”), partly practical (resources, tools, utilities, code libraries, master data), but mostly, a COE is a community of people with a shared goal and mission. 

In 2007, I  founded and served as the first director of Applix’s Center of Excellence, which was designed as a prototype that (then Applix’s, now IBM’s) TM1 customers could use to set up their own COE. I’m thrilled to be resuming that mandate at Cubewise alongside some fantastic colleagues.

The mission of a TM1 COE runs the gamut of application requirements gathering, design, development, deployment, training, operations and support. A pretty tall order! The good news is that Pulse’s feature set intersects with these COE mission elements perfectly.

A TM1 COE has five (5) main areas of responsibility:

• Application Definition – interfacing with the Line of Business application owners, gathering their requirements and definitions of success, then translating those into effective functional and technical TM1 designs
• Development – using best practices to model the data and business logic into a coherent set of TM1 database and presentation objects, and establishing verification criteria for completeness and correctness
• Governance – creating system documentation, establishing security by user role, ensuring license and regulatory compliance, defining backup and disaster recovery scenarios
• Operations – establishing Service Level Agreements, monitoring Business As Usual processes, troubleshooting and handling exceptions, resolving user-raised functional and performance issues, executing period-end procedures, supporting special requests
• Corporate Learning – ensuring user adoptions goals are being met,  on-boarding new TM1 community members, defining and testing for required competencies by role

In future blog posts, we’ll be exploring exactly how Cubewise Pulse for TM1 helps you fulfill the COE mission, achieve your business goals with TM1, and make your Center of Excellence truly excellent!

If you haven’t already discovered Pulse, I invite you to explore this website and to contact us for more information. If you are a Pulse customer, please let us know if you have a formal COE program, or if we can help you establish one.