Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 2

The Context for Performance Dashboards

Chapter 1 showed that performance dashboards provide a visual way for organizations to measure, monitor, and manage critical business activity. However, to understand performance dashboards, we need to examine the business and technical context in which they operate.

This chapter examines the concepts and principles of business performance management that provide the business rationale for performance dashboards. It also explores business intelligence concepts and technologies, which power most (but not all) performance dashboards today.

Business Performance Management

Defining BPM

Business performance management (BPM) is a series of management disciplines, processes, and tools that enable organizations to optimize the way they execute business strategy. Performance dashboards play a pivotal role in BPM initiatives since they provide a window into business performance and a visual way to chart progress against goals.

Confusion. Unfortunately, there is still confusion about what BPM is—and is not. Much confusion stems from the fact that performance management involves multiple processes and applications that all organizations already implement to some degree. These include strategic planning processes, financial consolidation and reporting, planning and budgeting, forecasting and modeling, and dashboards and scorecards. When introduced to the concept of BPM, many managers rightfully exclaim, “We’ve been doing that for years!” ...