Performance Management

Performance Management and Decision Making

Performance is not just numbers—it’s numbers in context. Results related to your goals. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. New challenges from competition, compliance, and sudden market changes underscore the value of managing performance more than ever before.

But the various activities necessary to manage performance—strategic and operational plans, metrics, day-to-day decisions—have been difficult to integrate. Companies are managing these efforts with complex people- and paper-intensive processes. Ultimately, the costs and delays of such approaches will restrain or cripple them.

Your company’s performance is directly related to the decisions people make every day—from executives to the frontline, across functional areas an regions. Those decisions are affected by the quality and timeliness of information.

Everyone must work from the same page. They need to know what is happening, why, and what should happen. They must understand how their activities move the enterprise forward and be able to measure that progress. It’s the definition of the “well-oiled machine.” The oil is information. Decisions are the fuel.

Interfacing's performance management

Interfacing's performance management (powered by Cognos) solutions help make this machine work. Coordinate your consolidation, planning and budgeting, reporting and analysis, and scorecarding for consistent decisionmaking.

Reliable, timely information drives better decisions. And better decisions drive improved performance. While you may have any number of decisions to make during your business day, they depend on answers to these fundamental questions:

• What is happening—An easy-to-see gauge of the most critical indicators for your organization.
• Why—The ability to dig deeper into current results, and against what was expected, to understand and learn from what led to the numbers.
• What should happen—The facility to set plans, allocate resources, monitor them, and adapt.

Answers to these fundamental questions can come from a host of different places—emails, past presentations,the general ledger, spreadsheets, and various corporate data stores that mean authoring or requesting reports from IT. Often, the answers are found only by combining data from many systems. These data sources are often disconnected, and rapidly multiplying.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2012, enterprises will need to deal with 30 times more data than in 2002. It is impossible to track everything. Corporate performance management software delivers the coordinated, consistent information you need to make the best decisions with confidence. With integrated plans, forecasts, reports, and scorecards, you will understand where you are, what brought you there, and where you want to go.