PERFORMANCE: SOME RESEARCH IDEAS

I.

Performance Management Capability Maturity Model: A Global Comparison

Different organisations, measuring different KPIs, use different types of performance management systems (PMS). Depending on the kind/type of performance measures used, one can classify a particular PMS as primitive or advanced: e.g. the traditionally used measures like financial, customer or employee focussed etcetera can be deemed to be primitive while as the comparatively recent measures like those relating to innovation, learning, environment, supplier, growth etcetera can be deemed as advanced. Similarly, organisations using framework like Balance Score Card (BSC) or Performance Pyramid (PP) can be deemed as advanced. Therefore, the different kinds of KPI/PMS can be arranged in a general performance capability maturity continuum, with the measures deemed to be the most advanced occupying one extreme of the continuum/scale while as the performance measures deemed to be the most primitive will occupy the other extreme. Once the maturity model is defined, we can classify different organisations according to their position on this continuum model. Needy et al in Enterprise Performance Management: The Global State of the Art note that [R]emember designing and deploying an enterprise performance management system is best conceived as a journey. The idea here is similar: instead of a journey, we can employ a maturity model to evaluate an organisations performance management capability maturity and classify them accordingly. The study envisages classifying similar groups of organisations in different countries (including Denmark) and seeing if organisations in different countries throw up a pattern/ trend. The number and choice of organisations/ countries can be made in accordance with the scope of the study. We can take a good mix of developed, emerging and developing economies across different continents, and within each country we may choose a mix of organisations across different sectors/sizes.

II.

Evolution of Performance Management in Denmark

With a few notable exceptions (Meyer and Gupta, 1994; Townley and Cooper, 1998; Bourne et al., 2000), empirical investigation of the evolution of measurement systems over time remains a considerable gap in performance measurement research (Neely, 1999). The idea is to address, so far as it concerns Denmark, this gap. It is proposed to undertake a study on the performance management systems (PMS) employed by a selection of Danish companies/organisations over a period of time. The selection will includes a mix of organisations/ companies from different sectors, different sizes etcetera; the number of companies/ organisations shall be as many as are deemed appropriate according to the
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scope of this level study. The time period can be, say, last two, three, four or more decades. The study will try to outline the broad story of PMS in Danish organisations and try to see if there have-been any trends/patterns in the PMS practised by companies/organisations in Denmark over the given period of time. The study will also try to tease out any sub-trends in the different sectors, sizes etcetera. The study will identify the recent/ current trends in PMS in Denmark and try to nail the underlying reasons thereof. The research instrument can be a semi-structured interview or a questionnaire.

III.

Current Trends of PMS in Danish Organisations: A Global Comparison

The idea is to study the PMS in a selected group of Danish organisations and compare them with similar groups in a bunch of different countries globally. The countries can be chosen to represent a broad spectrum of economies/cultures; e.g., US, one or two Scandinavian countries, Germany, China, India, Korea, Japan, one or two Latin American countries etcetera. The study will try to project a comparison of the PMS state of the art as practised in Denmark vis-a-vis the other world countries. The research instrument can be a semi-structured interview or a questionnaire.

IV.

Balance Score Card in Danish Organisations

Since Art Schneiderman first developed and used a Balanced Scorecard at Analogue Devices in 1987 followed by Kaplan and Nortons Harvard Business Review paper in 1992, there has been a continues growth in use of key performance measures and the Balanced Scorecard (Franco et al., 2004, Neely et al., 2008, Martinez et al, 2009). In fact, data collected by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative suggest that over 50 per cent of surveyed firms worldwide had adopted the balanced scorecard by the middle of 2001, with a further 25 percent considering it (Downing, 2001). It seems a good idea to see if BSC has a similar acceptability in Denmark. The idea is to select about 500 or more Danish organisation across different sectors and see what percentage of them have adopted/tried BSC and if there are any patterns overall or among the different sectors. Subsequently, from among the organisations that have adopted BSC, a group can further be studied in detail to identify the reasons, enablers, barriers etcetera that play a role in the adoption of BSC in Denmark. The study can be enlarged to study a group of organisations that have not adopted BSC to see why companies do/have not adopted BSC.

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