As management practice becomes increasingly complex, the professionals within the sector have embarked on a program to codify and therefore disseminate basic tenets of business performance management. It is no longer enough to manage by instinct and talents. Executives are requires to attend training courses and could even obtain qualifications in management. This article will look back at the brief history of business performance management.

Even before it became a business concept that is we there were applications of business performance in a non-office environment. For examples Tzu framed it in terms of understanding the relative weaknesses of the opponent and competitor.

This understanding of business performance management was particularly useful when undertaking warfare. It would involve the inversion of the formula so that one could examine their own organization and apply the same rigorous standards that they would apply to an enemy. It still involved the essential ingredients of data gathering which was then deciphered and turned into practical information.

Prior to the full development of information technology, organizational decisions were more often than not arising out of gut instinct rather than scientific evidence. This could lead to excellent decisions or it could lead to horrendous decisions but there was no systematic or consistent means of analyzing the critical factors for making decisions. It was not because of a lack of management information. In fact information was manually being collated on a very large scale involving vast numbers of staff. However this information was not in a compact or easily accessible format and therefore managers would find it inconvenient to make short term decisions based on it.

With the advent of information technology it was now possible to process vast amounts of data and disseminates it to a very wide spectrum of people. Pivotal table principles allowed individual managers to select only that portion of the management data that applied to them. This allowed the decisions makers to identify patterns of working. A correlation between management information and business performance management was established and gradually it was scaled up to a full profession.

In the late 1980S business writers began to seek new terminology to describe the process of managing organizations. As is often the case, professional bodies were established and contracting firms started to offer services on an outsourcing basis. At that point internal business managers were rather awestruck by some of the terminology and the concepts that were being put forward.

Business performance management then went through a phase where it was just like any other fad. All sorts of wild theories would be created and discredited. Eventually the practice was applied to both small and large organizations. As the results started to come in, there was a process of natural selection where the best theories would be adopted by the most successful companies while the unconvincing ones were left to die a natural death.

These days performance management is embedded in all business practice. It has been a standard addition to the manager’s toolkit and is consistently visible within any management training or recruitment programs.