Strategic Business Management

2

ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: MYTH OR REALITY?

Confusion exists in the marketplace about the term performance management. If you research the term, you will see what I mean.

The confusion begins with which type of performance management we are referring to. This confusion, in part, is due to semantics and language. We often see in the press the acronyms BPM for business performance management, CPM for corporate performance management and EPM for enterprise performance management. Just like the foreign language words merci, gracias, danke shön and thank you all mean the same thing, so do these acronyms. For this book, I choose to use enterprise performance management and its acronym EPM. I will also use analytics-based enterprise performance management when there is emphasis on analytics imbedded in the various EPM methodologies.

Additional confusion is that EPM is perceived by many as far too narrow. It is often referenced as a CFO initiative with a bunch of measurement dashboards for feedback. It is much, much more. More recent confusion comes from the term being narrowly applied to a single function or department, such as marketing performance management or information technology performance management.

The term performance management historically referred to individual employees and was used by personnel for employee appraisals. Today, it is widely accepted as enterprise performance management of an organisation as a whole, whether it is a commercial, not-for-profit or ...