http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Corporate Portfolio Management: January 2005

Saturday, January 8, 2005

Corporate Portfolio Management blog begins...

Corporate Portfolio Management (CPM) - An increasingly important discipline. I hope to share some of my experiences, insights, ideas and questions about CPM through this blog, and more importantly, hope to encourage discussion amongst current and prospective practitioners of the CPM discipline. Of course, the many valuable (and sometimes not so valuable) insights of other practitioners and thought leaders will also be highlighted.

For those unfamiliar with the term CPM, let's start with a bit of a definition. CPM encapsulates several other more commonly known terms such as enterprise portfolio management or project portfolio management (PPM). By encapsulate, I mean that enterprise portfolio management and PPM are most-often associated with information technology (IT) while CPM is more expansive. CPM includes IT investments but also is a strategy & discipline that can be utilized to optimize decisions related any area where an organization is making discretionary investment including: marketing/advertising & promotion, salesforce, IT, R&D/innovation, capital expenditures, operations, etc. CPM looks at these discretionary projects but as investments which generate benefits - financial, strategic, risk, etc.

In terms of my background and expertise with CPM, I am currently a Vice President at American Express managing the organization's corporate portfolio management effort (known internally as Investment Optimization). Additionally, I head up American Express CFO's internal strategy and business analysis group. I've lead the development of the company's CPM effort which is patent-pending alongside numerous talented colleagues over the last several years.

Beyond efforts at American Express, I've had the opportunity to speak with numerous thought leaders within other organizations and think tanks about CPM who've really helped to evolve my thinking about CPM and the field overall. I hope some of them will contribute to this blog going forward and/or that I'll get the opportunity to share some of their insights with you over time.

I welcome your feedback, questions and ideas about this blog, and my hope is that will serve as a useful forum to spur dialogue, new ideas and greater interest in and realization of the power of CPM. Happy optimizing. Whether you agree or disagree with my viewpoints, I welcome and look forward to your feedback.