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

Preface to the First Edition

A Path to Pursue

False Starts

Business Performance Management. The original focus of this book was business performance management (BPM). Tim Burgard, my editor at John Wiley & Sons, had read an in-depth report that I wrote on the topic in 2003 and asked whether I would be interested in turning it into a book geared to business professionals. Other than the normal reservations one might have about undertaking a book project in addition to a full-time job, I was not particularly thrilled about exploring BPM in greater depth.

My initial research showed that BPM meant different things to different people. It was a broad, catch-all category of applications and technologies, including everything from financial consolidation and reporting tools to planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications to dashboards and scorecards, among other things. BPM seemed to reflect whatever vendors had in their product portfolios at the time rather than representing a distinct and compelling discipline in itself.

Conceptually, however, most people seem to agree that the purpose of BPM is to focus organizations on things that really matter. Too many organizations spread their energies and resources far and wide and consequently never make much progress toward achieving their strategic objectives. The theory behind BPM is that organizations need to identify the key activities that contribute most to their success and make sure they do them well. In short, the purpose ...