FSN: Acute shortages of performance management skills could be short lived

Acute shortages of performance management skills could be short lived

2nd July 2007
A recent spate of mergers and acquisitions in the performance management market is once again changing the competitive landscape for the major vendors and the customers they serve. Novel business combinations create both tensions and opportunities but the ability to speedily execute on strategy and take advantage of newly acquired positioning is heavily reliant on the key resources to deliver and implement applications. A skills shortage could jeopardise progress in the short term but there are very early signs of improving conditions, reports Gary Simon, FSN's managing editor.

Even before the current market turmoil there was rising evidence of a skills shortage in the enterprise performance management space. In some quarters suppliers were delaying implementations or at least being picky and choosy about which projects they would serve. But the recent deals threaten to jeopardise the status quo in a particularly unpredictable way.

Victoria Woodcock, head of the BPM practice for Systems Accountants, the largest specialist recruiter in this segment says that it is too early to call the changes in the marketplace but confirms the skills shortage. “Hyperion skills are the shortest in supply, especially for the newer Hyperion System 9, Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Hyperion Planning.”

Woodcock confirms that it is the same state of affairs whether looking in the permanent or contract market. In fact Systems Accountants sees a shift of resources from the permanent to contractor market as experienced individuals realise their market worth through high daily rates and take advantage of more flexible working arrangements that come with being self employed. “A good HFM contractor can command anywhere between £700 and £900 per day for challenging implementation work although simpler upgrade or development work attracts rates at the lower end of the range.” But Woodcock warns would be contractors that their skills have to be current.

“Clients do not want to take last generation Hyperion Pillar or Enterprise skills. The difficulty is that there are not enough skilled resources in the market.”

According to Systems Accountants, clients are willing to play their part in overcoming some of the obstacles. For example some companies will send permanent recruits on training courses to convert them to the latest release of the software but are not usually prepared to do this for contractors. “Unfortunately, clients often leave it to the very last minute to seek resource and are often unrealistic about timescales. Essentially there is full employment of contractors who can upgrade from HFM to System 9,” she says. “This means that smaller less remunerative jobs are harder to fill.”

So what difference will Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion make to the current market dynamics? Woodcock postulates that one consequence of a rapidly growing market and cross selling in the newly merged organisation is that Oracle will probably have to retrain some of its Business Intelligence resources and specialists in older products such as GCS in the newly acquired Hyperion products. But she warns against the ‘certified consultant' route. “Clients do not want certificates and a novice consultant who has recently completed an in-house training course. They want practical experience gained at the coal face,” she adds. “Eventually more skilled people will come onto the market but it will take some time.”

However another possible consequence of the recent acquisitions is that more individuals will come into the marketplace because they do not want to work in vast organisation. This could particularly affect OutlookSoft consultants who now find themselves working for the software giant SAP or perhaps Hyperion consultants who find it difficult to adapt to Oracle's culture.

Guy Weismantel of Business Objects told FSN that this is beginning to happen, “We're not seeing any impact on resourcing in the wake of our acquisition of Cartesis. If anything, quite honestly we've seen a lot of movement (or people trying to move, that is) out of Hyperion and into Business Objects. We have a bit of a different perspective as well as our Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) group was actually smaller than the Cartesis team, so our issue internally is not lack of resources, but actually having the right number of combined resources to be profitable going forward and to hit our revenue targets. Other companies may be having different issues, but fortunately for us, that's not happening to us right now,” he added.

But the skills shortage is not confined to Hyperion. “OutlookSoft is another black spot,” says Woodcock. “It hasn't created a large enough user base and so the contracting market has not really developed,” she adds. “On the other hand there is plenty of technical resource available to serve Cognos ReportNet and Analysis Studio but there is a shortage of contractor resource to support Cognos Planning and Cognos Controller.”

Systems Accountants advises clients to look for a mix of skills, drawing on broader capability rather than relying completely on package specific knowledge. Increasingly, the recruiter is seeing people with a healthy mix of systems and finance skills with more projects in performance management being driven from the finance department rather than the IT function.

Weismantel agrees. He told FSN, “Performance management is such a growing space that new people are coming into the discipline all the time. The other interesting angle we've seen is that the definition of performance management is broadening out, which means that tangential areas that maybe didn't form the "core" of what people used to think of as performance management is widening considerably. Areas like business process management, for instance, that were far out of the range of performance management in the past is quickly become a central component--which for us means that new practitioners are coming into our sphere all the time.”

In the past the performance management market has been notoriously incestuous and the recent spate of mergers could simply herald a merry-go-round of resources travelling from one company to another. But more encouragingly, the broad growth of the performance management market is attracting new resources and skill sets in newer technologies and disciplines that are now a part of performance management.

According to Business Objects' Weismantel the performance management space is a very healthy and dynamic marketplace – a view that is supported by Victoria Woodcock. Like all ‘hot-spots' in an economy, it will draw in the resources it needs over time and with the re-skilling of an increasingly international and mobile workforce, the skills shortages of today may be short lived.

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