Performance Management Demystified

Navigating the confusion to achieve performance management's promise

You've heard performance management touted as the cure-all business solution more times than you care to count — and likely in as many flavors. Perhaps you're not yet convinced that performance management is not just another panacea du jour that will soon take its place in the annals of management and technology trends whose promise fell short. If you have been tempted to dip your toe in the water and see what the clamor is about, perhaps you are struggling with where to begin. How do you navigate this fresh sea of acronyms — BPM (business performance management), FPM (financial performance management), OPM (operational performance management), to name a few — and find success in performance management's promised land?

With a focus on automation and efficiency, the 1990s equipped organizations with more data — and faster — than ever dreamed. Unfortunately, more reports, spreadsheets and emails scattered in islands across the organization were not the answer. If the 90s were about efficiency, this decade's unique set of challenges demands a focus on effectiveness — in other words, results. As organizations have begun to understand that the one with the most data does not necessarily win, they've sought a way to help them actually achieve their desired results or goals.

Enter performance management, whose focus is on creating methodical and predictable ways to improve business results, or performance, across organizations. Simply put, performance management helps organizations achieve their strategic goals. Rather than discarding the data accessibility previous systems fostered, performance management harnesses it to help ensure that an organization's data works in service to organizational goals to provide information that is actually useful in achieving them.