Does Performance Management mean replacing some of my existing business applications?
No, that's not really the intent, what a performance management system will do is complement those existing transactional systems like the general ledger and ordering processing systems that are for example running the operational activity in your business what a performance management system is doing is sitting at a level above those allowing you to make sense of all the data held in those systems and understand what it's telling you. You can use a performance management systems to monitor some of those key operational functions on a very short term basis and you can also use the data in those systems to see what's going on, examine trend and then make longer term forecasts about what you want to do and where you want to take your business.