An Overview Of Performance Measurement:

Introduction

In 1959, Churchman (1959) wrote on the importance “ to develop a method of generating a class of information that will be useful in a wide variety of problems and situations”. Today, this is sentence has translated into the widely known term of performance measurement, which according to Sinclair & Zairi (1995) is defined as the systematic assignment of numbers to entities and according to Neely, Gregory & Platts (2005) is “the process of quantifying the efficiency and effectiveness of action”.

As what was mentioned by Parker (2000), measuring performance is something that all organizations do, be it systematically and thoroughly or on an ad-hoc basis and only superficially. In fact, it has become a must-do process that all organizations have adopted. Every resource and its use as well as all the processes within an organization in addition to the various influencing external factors, are measured and weighted in order to squeeze out every iota of available advantage that will gift the organization with an edge to stay competitive in today’s highly globalized business world.

Frameworks: Trend and varieties

According to various journals reviewed, (Kennerley & Neely, 2003; Sinclair et al., 1995) for the longest time, the measurement used to determine the success of an organization i.e. the organization’s performance has always been one that uses traditional financial accounting systems. While such a measurement method remain invaluable especially to, the external agents whose interests tend to be on the profits achieved, they tend to lead to according to Kennerly et al. (2003), the lack of strategic focus or “short termism” within the organization. It became quite apparent that these measures were inadequate particularly to supply information