Editorial

Citation

Bourne, M. (2006), "Editorial", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 10 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2006.26710daa.001

Editorial

The final issue of the 10th volume of Measuring Business Excellence begins with an interesting paper challenging conventional wisdom regarding the drivers of organisational performance. In his article on high performance systems, Keith Denton quotes a number of examples of high performing organisations to illustrate his conclusion that it is not technology or even people who are the determinant of high performance, but the way they are organised. He argues that a well approaching problems systematically can help an organisation deliver more than the sum of its parts and that organisational performance can be improved by effectively bundling together innovative practices

Sharma and Bhagwat present the first of two papers on the subject of measuring IT performance and particularly the contribution of IT to strategic organisation performance. Their paper highlights gap in the literature in that, despite the large number of SMEs and the enormous contribution that they make to the global economy, most of the research regarding IS performance to date has focused on large organisations. Their paper investigates the application of established tools to SMEs and does so in India, currently one of the quickest growing and intriguing economies in the world.

Sureshchandar and Leisten continue this theme. They recognise that the software metrics used in companies are often in appropriate or too numerous. Their paper investigates the use of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for identifying the critical few appropriate measures for assessing software performance. AHP is an method that has been applied for some time by academics to weight and structure complex multi-criteria problems. This paper demonstrates its practical application to multi-criteria decisions.

The paper by Percin provides a further practical application of AHP to a different area of the organisational – supplier selection. The paper shows how AHP, along with pre-emptive goal programming can be used to systematically consider a range of different criteria can be considered when selecting the most appropriate suppliers of materials to a manufacturing organisation. The approach allows integration of quantitative and qualitative criteria to enable the choice of the suppliers who can provide the required combination of product service performance.

Lee addresses the highly topical issue of performance management in the public sector, specifically that of education. The paper discusses the drivers of performance and the applicability of a Balanced Scorecard based approach to schools in Malaysia.

In their paper Nwokah and Maclayton apply accepted concepts to a new geographical region. The need for organisations to take a “customer focus”, and the impact of such focus on business performance has been well researched, particularly in the marketing literature. Through their research however, Nwokah and Maclayton have found that such strategies and approaches have not been extensively applied in the Nigerian context, particularly in their food and beverages industry. Replicating existing instruments, they identify moderating variables through which customer focus affects business performance.

In his paper, Krishnan provides a valuable background to the history of the cost of quality concept, before emphasising the importance of identifying “hidden” costs of quality. He highlights the importance of making these costs visible in order to reduce non-value adding activities, and provides an approach that organisations can use to do so.

To complete this volume, we are delighted to report an interview the Measuring Business Excellence did with Dr David Norton at the recent Balanced Scorecard European Summit. It was a great opportunity to talk to one of the founders of the most influential approach in this field.

Mike Bourne, Mike Kennerley