Bringing It All Together

Every organization has values. Every organization has stakeholders. Most already have a mission statement -- addressing the stakeholders -- although it may not be well-integrated into the day-to-day business. Some companies can boost performance by just unearthing their old mission statement and linking their values with their CPM practices. However, an organization that wants to become high-performance should take a methodical approach to performance management. It should start by creating a gap analysis that identifies the areas in its reporting, business cases, dashboards, and scorecards that closely correlate to the organization's different stakeholder groups -- and identifies where these correlations are missing. The company then should determine what its internal values are, as well as the values of its customers. If it discovers misalignment between the two, it should focus on fixing the problem before moving on.

Companies that want to become high-performing should determine which agility strategy fits them best and assess how their management cycles reflect the characteristics of that agility model. In addition, they must evaluate their current plans for new products, reorganizations, IT systems, and project requirements to see whether they are adaptable to change. Making systems and processes agile may not always be the cheapest option, but the effort will pay for itself many times over in the future.

A prospective HPO also needs to clean up its organization. It must eliminate siloed processes and systems, and replace them with shared systems. Managers could start by harmonizing reporting systems, cleaning up and consolidating datamarts, and purging masses of spreadsheets. They could also begin by instituting planning systems that cross multiple business domains, or by introducing a scorecard with performance indicators on which other reporting systems can focus. An aggressive one-version-of-the-truth initiative is crucial to becoming high-performance, as well. This should result in a data warehouse with a high-quality data set, including the business's metadata and standardized tables for key business entities such as suppliers, customers, products, and materials.

When a company has accomplished each of these steps, it will have the correct context in which to make decisions to move forward. Yet organizations must remember that execution is not a single step. It is a continuous process that never stops. The journey toward becoming a high-performance organization is never-ending, and it's full of pitfalls and detours. Still, every step along the way is worthwhile because it improves the company in some manner. For the HPO, the journey is the destination.

Frank Buytendijk is vice president of corporate strategy for Hyperion. He helps drive strategic direction for Hyperion worldwide. Before joining Hyperion in early 2006, Buytendijk was a research vice president with Gartner.