Enterprise performance is at the core of management focus today. More than just financial measures, quantitative and qualitative measures are a critical element of measuring success today. Measures and measurement systems are the foundation of returning value to investors and owners of an enterprise. As a result, the improvement of performance is one of the most significant tasks managers have in today's enterprise.

A key result of performance management is achieving a lean and more flexible enterprise that returns maximum results. Management uses various methods to achieve these results. Using scorecarding and dashboards is a concise way management uses to communicate its objectives, goals, and results.

For example, financial planning and budgeting process sets objectives and goals which are the basis of a more advanced management discipline and approach. But, this process is not enough to implement an operational performance improvement system today. What is needed is an effective and efficient way to achieve strategic and enterprise level improvement. A key component to the successful deployment of a performance measurement, management and reporting approach is the use of appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs). How is it achieved? It is achieved by the skillful use of performance measures and the presentation of these measures that communicates them to all the stakeholders in the enterprise.

Key benefits of developing a performance management system using this approach is:

• ability to evaluate the overall performance of the enterprise
• way to identify those key measures of for the enterprise
• means to integrate measures across the business
• gain key insights to strategic enterprise management
• understand and internalize business modeling for performance
• learn to develop and apply dimensionless measures
• distinguish between business intelligence and performance management
• manage performance data
• learn which parts of the business contribute most to performance
• learn where to apply the levels of investment in operations
• ability to effective communicate management objectives across the enterprise

Impact analysis uses one or more matrices to infer (that is indirectly identify) what things might be impacted by a change. So, you can show the relationship of processes to other things, such as: strategies, documents, decisions, or systems in a matrix. The processes are the rows and the columns might be documents (or any other model type). The matrix would show what processes use which documents.

Using impact analysis, for example, you have several matrices. One matrix has “Strategies” as rows and “Processes” as columns and another matrix has “Processes” as rows and “Systems” as the columns. This is accomplished by using the linkage of a “Strategies-to-Processes” and “Processes”-to-“Documents”. As an analyst, you can see which “Systems” would be impacted if a change is made to “Strategies”.

Since we are limited in how much we can spend in money and time to gather the information directly, this is technique is very useful. You could gather material that shows what strategies are related to systems but it is not obvious nor is it easy to gather. It is easy to gather the material on which processes support which strategies. This is often done as part of a strategic planning exercise. You also can find out which systems support different process since often IT has that material. With the use of inference technique, you can easily identify which strategies impact the most systems, document etc. So, when management contemplates a change in strategy, you will know how much effort it will take to align the business with the new strategy. Today, in most businesses, the assessment of impact is just a good guess often done by consultants.