Getting a promotion is probably one of the best things you could achieve in your chosen career, particularly if it is within the field of business, finance and accounting. Working hard to maintain this position and continuing to work to this level is up to the individual. However, many companies monitor their staff through performance management and performance appraisals, in order to determine the promotions. The route of this kind of drive and ambition for better performance strategies and business plans derives from a long history of battles and wars.



History

Historically non-business performance management originated from Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War'. The piece depicts that in war one must determine their own strengths and weaknesses, before determining their enemy's strengths and weaknesses in order to succeed in war. Lacking in either one will mean defeat - this theory is in practise parallel to the challenges of the business world. For example, collecting and collating information/data, data analysis, finding the patterns and meaning in the data and responding to the sufficient results found.

Before businesses began automating their data, collecting information was laborious job and very often made commercial decisions based on intuition. Since the information era of the latter, half of the twentieth century automated systems made it easier to retrieve and collect more data. Even drawing up reports, sieving through data, extracting information and transforming data into useful knowledge for businesses, has become more efficient for businesses of the advancement in technology.

Performance management and appraisals follow the military style ideologies in achieving success. Top businesses that work on ruthless strict strategies to out-do their rivals, work at great lengths to collect data from their opposing parties, in order to work out their own patterns or strategies. Military bibles were the driving force of most businesses and gave rise to key performance indicators (KPIs), risk analysis and enterprise application integration.

The business worlds are more advanced, yet more competitive with many innovative approaches to stay on top against rival companies. Most companies offer regular in-house training and team building strategies to maintain their success level. In 1989, Howard Dresner had popularized the term 'Business Intelligence', in order to improve business decisions by using fact-based support systems. Performance Management merges the concept of business intelligence into the planning and control cycle of an enterprise.

The key to a successful organisation is preparation and planning, before taking the next action. Modern businesses are constantly researching new ways of collecting data and finding updated technological equipment to expand their profits. It is also important for businesses to understand its goals and objectives, which can be analysed through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that assess the current condition of the business and calculates the nest course of action. Some larger businesses makes KPI's available on a weekly or daily basis, which means data is made available within 24 hours. Hence, the importance of maintaining and updating automated IT systems.