by Christina Pomoni

Created on: May 12, 2008   Last Updated: June 22, 2009

Modern organizations are aware that the more they progress, the more multifaceted and intricate challenges they would have to face. Organizations need to become process-oriented in order to be able to offer immediate and efficient customer service. Along with a customer-centric philosophy and effective administration structures, organizations need to coordinate diverse people to perform multiple tasks in order to achieve competitive advantage and remain viable in today's business environment.

Business Performance Management (BPM) includes business processes that effectively address the issues of improved business management, increased productivity, increasing profit, customer satisfaction and staff empowerment. Effective performance and talent management has been established to increase employee morale and overall productivity. Business Performance Management (BPM) assists in communicating organizational goals, and aligning and evaluating employee performance in order to recognize gaps and develop skills to properly devise succession plans for the management and attainable career paths for the workforce.

The general idea of Business Performance Management (BPM) is that is necessary to obtain different kind of information for different type of decision making. In particular:
For strategic decision making, top management should be supported through dashboards that consist of key performance indicators.
For regular decision making, Business Performance Management (BPM) provides data mining models that offer the potential of thorough analysis of historical data as well as forecasting.
For business decision making, it is essential to consider the work-flow log and create business intelligence analytics to support decision making at this level. In this context, decision support systems, management information systems, knowledge management systems, data mining and on line analytical processing (OLAP) form the business intelligence model.

Business Performance Management (BPM) is not based only on the idea of monitoring business activities (Business Activity Monitoring), but it analyzes further their relation to substantial factors that impact those activities. Modern business trends require that business intelligence model is used by diverse departments based on separate departmental objectives. Therefore, the use of appropriate business tools is critical to make these processes effective. In addition, clear goal planning, skill development and a true pay-for-performance culture are talent management practices that successful organizations use to demonstrate their employees are valued.

The challenges that need to be anticipated at any organizational level are many. Business Performance Management (BPM) assists top management to acquire comprehensive and centralized information and middle management to possess strong tools and business models to achieve effective decision making. Along with the need to administrate huge volume of data effectively, real time analysis is essential to reach the proper decision within tight time frames. This is mostly important in regards to increasing costs, fierce competition and time necessary to hire and train new talent that makes retention of top performers imperative.

Conclusively, Business Performance Management (BPM) is an effective strategic tool assisting in organizational performance. Decision makers acquire comprehensive and analytical info the moment the need it. This is feasible with the launch of resourceful business processes that move beyond the departmental barriers, while allowing and requiring the cooperation of the right people / departments to achieve organizational goals.

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