Luca Quagini's blog

Many business processes are measurable. That does not make them key to the company's success. In selecting Key Performance Indicators, it is critical to limit them to those factors that are essential to the organization reaching its objectives and it is also essential to keep the number of Key Performance Indicators small just to keep manager's focused on the right indicators.

The main characteristics of good KPIs include alignment to the organisation perspectives, measurement of its main actions and connect different processes.

BI and CPM market, with a CAGR of 9% yielded in the recent years, is still the most dynamic in the IT applications portfolio, with an impressive growth of expected number of business users, from the current 25% to 50% of the companies’ workers in less than 5 years.

The key drivers are changing; analytic excellence needs new frameworks and new architectures in order to cover the new “big” information sources.

The focus on costs is gone, and so the focus on competition performed with an exclusive focus on cost reduction. The time of finance is over, as well as the attempt that many entrepreneurs have tried, in order to make their financial deals as a business driver itself, losing its meaning as an exclusive support to their core business. Now, and if the price to pay was not so high, I would say, “finally”, we only have innovation left, to save public and private companies.

In times of great uncertainty, in tough times where markets sharply reveal the loss of confidence, not just the world of finance, but also manufacturing companies are forced to deal with rapid rethinking and restructuring of their business model.

The identification and implementation of the “right” strategies and programs are no longer driven by searching only the growth, but these are “simply” essential choices for the protection of their positioning.

In times when talking about budget and performance seems to be in contrast with the purpose of resolving the confusion in the markets and to find solutions to improve unstable periods, I want to emphasize the belief that it is precisely now the right time to start our organizations in a serious program aimed at the Performance Management.

We are in that particular situation where the priorities to face become opportunities to improve the structural capacity of our enterprises.