Business performance management

Business performance management (BPM), also known as corporate performance management (CPM) enterprise performance management (EPM), organizational performance management, or simply performance management are a set of management and analytic processes that ensure activities and outputs meet an organization's goals in an effective and efficient manner. Business performance management is contained within approaches to business process management. Performance management can focus on the performance of a whole organization, a department, an employee, or the processes in place to manage particular tasks. Performance management standards are generally organized and disseminated by senior leadership at an organization and by task owners, and may include specifying tasks and outcomes of a job, providing timely feedback and coaching, comparing employees' actual performance and behaviors with desired performance and behaviors, instituting rewards, etc. The technique can involve outlining the role of each individual in the organization in terms of functions and responsibilities. Specialists in many fields are concerned with organizational performance including strategic planners, operations, finance, legal, and organizational development. Before the Information Age in the late 20th century, businesses sometimes laboriously collected data from non-automated sources. As they lacked computing resources to analyze the data properly, they often made commercial decisions primarily by intuition. As businesses started automating their processes, the availability of data increased. However, collection often remained a challenge due to a lack of infrastructure for data exchange or incompatibilities between systems. Reports on the gathered data sometimes took months to generate and these delays allowed lack of informed strategic decision-making. In 1989 Howard Dresner, a research analyst at Gartner, popularized "business intelligence" (BI) as an umbrella term to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems.