Performance Management is a hot topic these days. The more turbulent the global economy is, the more companies need to improve their forecasting and management reporting processes to gain better insight into which activities are helping their performance — and which are undermining it. Although many organizations' budgets for software upgrades have shriveled over the past year, business performance management (BPM) improvements seem more crucial to survival today than they were in boom times. Granted, I'm predisposed as editor of BPM Magazine to speak with people who think performance

management is a good investment, but the basic sales pitch for BPM must strike home with executives when the margin of error for decision-making shrinks. In the current economic climate, smart performance managers are rethinking their old ways of evaluating their company's success and planning their next moves.

For many businesses, a revamping of performance management processes begins with a look at the organization's value drivers. This activity can lead to surprising results in any environment, but companies today may find it especially enlightening. That's because many businesses' BPM processes have failed to keep up as organizational boundaries have blurred. Companies today tend to operate within performance networks; legal borders demarcating a corporate entity don't come close to containing the factors that impact its performance. Yet BPM improvement projects, and the performance metrics that result from them, usually focus only on the value drivers that reside within a company's walls. This myopic focus necessarily limits their effectiveness. This issue's first article, by Frank Buytendijk, a vice president and fellow in Oracle's EPM division and a former Gartner analyst, explains how companies can rewrite their metrics and revise their processes to look at all the drivers of value across their performance networks.

Suffice it to say, rewriting performance metrics is a challenging undertaking, and one that is compounded dramatically when the process involves redefining the organizational boundaries within which performance should be managed. While an accurate view of performance may be crucial in a down economy, the resources needed to develop that perspective are hard to come by. But our second feature article in this issue, by Ernst & Young principal Andy Rusnak, provides ammunition for the performance manager looking to convince others that the time is right for bettering BPM. Why can't this project be put off till budgets and time are freer? Well, very soon, U.S. public companies are going to be forced to rethink their performance metrics as part of their conversion from U.S. GAAP to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Preparations for IFRS present a great reason to revamp the organization's entire BPM framework. Our third article expands on this theme, delving into ways in which an IFRS center of excellence can use the accounting conversion to improve performance management and corporate governance.

Finally, we've included articles explaining two immediate — and perhaps less daunting — approaches to BPM improvement in this economy. One is the adoption of new performance management software delivered via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. The other is a custom benchmarking process, by which an organization can evaluate not just its performance targets, but the appropriateness of its metrics themselves. Thus, the issue comes full circle. It closes with case studies of two organizations that have used performance management practices and software to better define, and then fulfill, their strategic goals.