Any thoughts on expanding the number of dimensions beyond 16? I don't know that we're at a point (yet) where we need more than that, but it does concern me a little that as we start building scorecards we suddenly hit a wall and have to remove dimensions...

Hi Trav--

Hmmmmm... interesting.

We've had 16 Dimensions in PMF since release 3. Typically at customer sites we've seen 4-6 dimensions used. Very few have more than 6.

From this experience we always inferred that 16 would be a good number at which to hold, being that it's more than double even the most ambitious engagements we've seen.

Our focus has been on keeping PMF a very fast-performing solution. Increasing the taxonomy would always come at a cost. That's why we have kept to 16 Dimensions.

The message we've typically told customers when they ask this question - usually a theoretical question - is that if you're thinking of turning PMF into a more general purpose OLAP type solution, you might want to augment your solution with an OLAP *reporting* cube (e.g., Fusion, Essbase, MS).

Perhaps though you're using Dimensions in a way we haven't seen yet, so now we're interested. What do you foresee being the number, depth and nature of the list of Dimensions you'd need?

many thanks

Well, the short answer is ... I don't know.

Being very early in the implementation, I would say that right now it's a theoretical question for us too. But a quick brainstorming session yesterday produced a list of about 18 things -- however I'm sure that list will be consolidated, reduced, etc. in the coming weeks. Right now, I see about 4 or 5 dimensions that I'm pretty confident will have to be in our scorecards. I can see maybe 4 or 5 more that could also sneak in. So right now, my best estimate is around 10 total.

I'll know more in the coming weeks when we get our CFO organization together to determine what those dimensions are. In the mean time, I can definitely appreciate the desire to keep it low in order to preserve performance. For now, let's assume that 16 will be enough and if it looks like it will become a problem, I'll get back in touch and we can take the discussion of our specific dimensions offline.

Thanks!