Editorial

Citation

Bourne, M. (2005), "Editorial", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 9 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2005.26709caa.001

Editorial

Following the change in format made at the start of this year, this issue has been subdivided into the following sections:

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  Insight from research, reporting latest research findings that have implications for practice.

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  Insight from practice, reporting case studies, best practice examples and reflections from practice.

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  Focus on regional views of performance measurement.

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  Events.

Insights from research

In this section we have two papers focusing on implementation, how we “translate strategy into action” as Kaplan and Norton put it in the title of their 1996 book. One of the biggest problems facing larger organisations isn’t the development of strategy, but its execution. Balanced scorecards and other performance measurement tools support this very effectively, but they are only one part of the complete change process, as illustrated by the two papers published in this issue.

The first is by Professor Norman Faull from Cape Town University and Patrick Fleming from Competitive Capabilities International. They have studied successful implementation practice across a range of manufacturing companies over many years and this paper summarises the outcomes of this research and presents a set of guiding principals to help implementation of performance enhancing activities. The paper also provides a scorecard to assess you own implementation processes against and summarises the practices of more successful implementers.

The second paper comes from Dr Redvers Counsell at GKN Aerospace Services and Dr Charles Tennant and Dr Kevin Neailey who are with Warwick manufacturing Group. This paper charts the development of change management in GKN and the development of a single change management process termed the “5 × 5 Model”. This has been developed and refined through action research to create a strategic and tactical planning process with transferable, common key issues, that can be managed in an environment of rapid change. Furthermore, the paper shows how discreet tailoring of the model enables differentiation of each programme type to support a standardized, repeatable and synchronous approach to change management.

Both these papers have principles and frameworks developed through research, but produce insights directly related to practice. Interestingly, both papers have a mix of academic and practitioner authors. This is the creation of knowledge in the context of practice, a theme that goes to the core of this journal.

Insights from practice

In this section we have an interesting paper by Dr Hubert Rampersad, President of TPS International Inc. based in California. He has developed the Total Performance Scorecard, which he develops in this paper.

Dr Rampersad argues that a new blueprint for creating a learning organization is needed in which personal and organizational performance and learning mutually reinforce each other on a sustainable base. He believes that traditional business management concepts are insufficiently committed to learning and rarely take the specific personal ambitions of employees into account. In consequence there are many superficial improvements, marked by temporary and cosmetic changes, which are coupled with failing projects that lack sufficient buy-in by personnel and, in some cases, even have an adverse effect.

This builds in part on our two earlier papers by emphasising the need to go much further than simple scorecard implementation to create sustainable change and performance improvement.

Focus on regional views of performance measurement

In the focus section this month we have a series of short articles from around the world reflecting on how performance measurement and management techniques are being used and developed.

These start with two papers from the UK. Mike Bourne, Monica Franco-Santos, Mike Kennerley and Veronica Martinez from the Centre for Business Performance, Cranfield School of Management, reflect on the UK experience drawing from both survey data of larger private sector organisations and experiences through research, executive education and working with companies. John Wilkes, Head of Performance Management, Capgemini, complements this with the results of Kable Research’s survey of the public sector and his reflections of best practice from a consulting perspective.

The second two papers are from South East Asia – Malaysia and Singapore. Dr Suresh Kumar Krishnan from QPIC Consultants Sdn. Bhd, based in Kuala Lumpur reflects on how the Malaysian Government is promoting performance measurement and some of the local realities on the ground. Dr Derrick Kon, President of CEO Solutions Pte Ltd in Singapore then identifies a number of well-developed uses of performance measurement and the balanced scorecard that can be found in Singapore today.

Professor Miguel Heras, from ESADE, Barcelona in Spain then provides a reflection on the state of the art from a Spanish perspective, highlighting a number of concerns he has from his recent involvement in a major European research project.

Bernard Marr’s paper summarises the descriptive findings from a survey of performance measurement practice in the USA. This survey focused on the larger private sector organisations and elicited responses from 780 CEOs and CFOs, making this one of the largest surveys of its type.

Finally, Pippa and Mike Bourne consolidate this review drawing on a series of short interviews with leading commentators from around the world.

There has been concern in the academic literature recently over whether performance measurement (and the balanced scorecard in particular) has a positive impact on organisational performance. A wide range of practitioner papers have suggested that this is the case, but many of the more rigorously researched applications suggest that the impact is far from clear. What is coming from the reflections of our contributors to this edition is that there are many levels of implementation of performance measurement. There is also a clear suggestion that the question “does performance measurement (balanced scorecard) make a positive impact on performance?” is probably premature until we can define in detail what performance measurement or the balanced scorecard means. A much better question is “what aspects of good performance measurement practice positively impact performance?” as the field of current practice is so wide and varied to make broader research problematic.

Events

Our final section highlights a few of the performance measurement and management events that are happening around the world.

Mike Bourne