Job Wanted – Chief Performance Officer
President Obama recognises the role of performance management in organizations if they want to be relevant in the future. He was not successful in getting McKinsey consultant Nancy Killefer on board (apparently she had some personal tax issues) as the Chief Performance Officer but he managed to appoint Jefferey Zients a while ago. Zients comes with an impressive record. He has 20 years of business experience as a CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur and has helped lead firms that provide performance benchmarks and best practices across a wide range of industries. Sounds like the man for the job. There seem to be renewed interest in the role of performance management in organizations.
Tom Davenport , a process management thought leader at Harvard, wrote in his “The Next Big Thing” blog about “The Rise of the Chief Performance Officer” appointment. The interesting is thing not his view on President Obama’s appointment but rather his view on the convergence of process management, knowledge management and performance management. Tom refers to a debate on merging various thought leader discussion groups and I quote his blog
“They noted, for example, that if you want to align knowledge and learning with work, you need to know something about business processes and how to improve them. And if you’re going to align processes with the content needed to perform them effectively, you need to know something about the technology that would deliver the content in accordance with job tasks. What this begins to suggest is that the era of siloed business improvement activities will give way to applying a variety of interventions to improve work. In other words, an organization run by a Chief Performance Officer might be called for. “
This has been the point of Performance Focused Process-Centric organizations and this blog all along. Knowledge Management in today’s organizations are tied to the hip with processes. Every process has contextual knowledge, transactional knowledge and procedural knowledge that makes the process work. Performance management endeavours to make processes effective, efficient, consistent and even predictable. Performance, process and knowledge management are inseparable in support of the business drivers mentioned in a previous post on this blog. Processes need to designed for performance and embed critical knowledge.
Most of today’s process, performance and knowledge management methodologies are supported by IT based tools. There are content, performance and process management solutions that can manage the transactional side of all these components, but the role of the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) will be to ensure a synergistic approach to methodology and tools. There is no one single solution that will work for all organisations that cover all 3 areas (there are not even tools in the 3 areas that cater for everything in that area) and the CPO will need to ensure that process are designed for performance and that it takes knowledge management into consideration. Knowledge Management should support performance and process management while performance management solutions should be based on quality information from knowledge based business processes. Definitely some food for thought.
Well done President Obama on recognizing the need for a Chief Performance Officer. Let’s see how well they perform
