Frank Buytendijk Blog

If you are a regular reader of the blog, you know we’ve been putting in quite a bit of effort and research to define a concept called management excellence.

Organizations have spent the last 10-15 years on achieving a level of operational excellence, focusing on cost, quality and speed. As this has become the new norm, competitive advantage must come from elsewhere. The three key competitive factors today are being smart, agile, and aligned. The business processes alone don’t make the difference anymore, it’s the management processes that do. Hence the idea of extending operational excellence to management excellence. We also created a comprehensive management process framework, called strategy-to-success.

We put it to the test, and created the EPM Index. Analyst firm Quocirca conducted 800 interviews all across Europe and North-America to assess the current state of EPM. To which extent do organizations master their management processes?

Well then, on a scale of 0 to 10, the respondents attained an overall score of 5.13. The results of the study indicate a generally modest level of achievement, with much work remaining to be done in developing an accurate and up-to-the-minute enterprise-wide picture of current performance.

I thought I’d share some interesting observations from the study:
• While organizations are moderately well-placed for each area (with the exception of stakeholder engagement) fewer than a quarter (22%) feel that an integrated approach to the processes is necessary and more than a quarter (27%) think that each process can be regarded in isolation.
• Of the six areas researched, the stakeholder environment scores were the lowest. This indicates that the involvement of stakeholders in the performance of the organisation is not being optimized. A high number of “don’t know” responses in this section indicates that many organizations may not even consider the needs of the stakeholders in their planning processes
• There is a high inverse correlation between a country’s Index score and its regulatory environment: on the whole, the higher the Index, the lighter the regulatory touch. The public sector and healthcare sectors, as the most highly regulated verticals, have the lowest overall EPM Index scores.
• Most organisations are slow to respond to changes in market and business environments with just 13% of respondents believing themselves to be well placed in this regard.
• Use of Business Intelligence (BI) has a significant bearing on EPM achievement. Respondents who see BI as being an "important" or "major" tool for their organization have index scores of 5.3, whereas those who see it as being an expensive means of visualizing data scored 5, and those who see it as a tool for historical reporting only scored 4.9.

There will be a comprehensive press release with more information, and there will be more information on EPMtv, including a self-assessment test.

We’ll be repeating the survey a few times in the future to see how things are progressing...