Performance Management Might Help Get You Through The Crisis

Is there a risk of losing creativity and the ability to make spontaneous decisions, when managers rely heavily on software-tools?
Just the opposite. Performance Management allows managers to make more spontaneous fact-based decisions – but those decisions can be based on information that’s up to date, relevant and readily available.

Are there typical mistakes of managers working with PM?
The best scenario is when both IT and business stakeholders have a say in Performance Management. IT can drive the implementation, but business stakeholders should be involved from the start. They are better poised to explain the benefits of launching a new solution, and they are typically the ones searching for new insights into business performance.

What are limitations to what PM can do? What are the future trends?
Performance Management continues to be recognized as a strategic imperative – especially in challenging economic times – and we don’t see this trend changing anytime soon. Delivering business information and intelligence on demand is critical for organizations today to survive and thrive. You have to know how your business is performing, determine what you can do to make it more effective, and be able to plan for the future.

Improved data visualization, collaboration using social computing trends, the increasing use of predictive insight and statistical analysis and the continued growth of role-based performance management are a few trends I see continuing in 2009 and beyond.

The financial crisis has shown, that risk management might get important in the future? Does PM provide tools to deal with obvious and with hidden risks?
Delivering trusted information, securely, to the right people at the right time, provides the ability to use information in entirely new ways for more proactive risk management. Many of our customers are already exploiting this opportunity. They are gaining new insight into how best to defer or curtail spending that is for the benefit of periods beyond short-term horizons, how to improve profits by understanding which customers are most profitable and retaining them and how to reduce risk by limiting exposure to chronically late suppliers or the impact of fluctuating market prices for supplies.

How do the tasks of analysis, planning, deciding and taking action go together in efficient Business Management?
Well, few areas under your management are more important than your organisation’s decision-making ability. This is increasingly important as the volume of digital data, variety of information and velocity required for decision-making continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. By integrating information, technology, and people, decision-makers can become performance managers. Performance managers look at metrics, plans, and reports in their functional area to make the best possible decisions for organizational agility. In this way, your good decisions cause other good decisions. The end result is better alignment, accountability, and performance.

Mehmet Toprak is senior online editor, eWEEK Europe in Germany