Performance measurement: from philosophy to practice

Even though remarkable progress has been made over recent years in the design of performance measurement frameworks and systems, many companies are still primarily relying on traditional financial performance measures. This paper presents an overview of the more common, more modern approaches to performance measurement and attempts to identify whether they have in fact addressed the limitations of traditional ways of measuring performance. The paper suggests that the modern frameworks have indeed addressed the underlying conceptual issues, but have rarely addressed the practicalities of measurement in ways that render them meaningful to practitioners. What is needed is further work to explore how these conceptual frameworks can be translated and tailored to fulfil the unique measurement needs of a specific company, especially at the operational level.