Howard Dresner - October 2007
Throughout human history, revolutions have led to radical changes in the governments, economic systems, social structures, and even the cultural values of nation states. The American Revolution of the late 1700s, for example, achieved the political separation of the 13 colonies in North America from the British Empire and led to a new form of democracy with respect for individual rights and property at its center.
The ancient Greeks took a rather dim view of revolution, believing it to be the result of an undesirable breakdown in social values and structures. It wasn't until the Renaissance that revolution acquired a more positive image, coming to be viewed as a sometimes necessary means of achieving freedom or advancing a cause.
Regardless of whether their outcomes are positive or negative, successful revolutions always result in fundamental and often irreversible changes in the established order. The coming revolution in performance management will be no different, resulting in fundamental and very likely irreversible changes in how organizations approach organizing and providing access to information, planning and implementing performance management initiatives and using technology to support these activities.
Perhaps the most dramatic outcome of the performance management revolution will be the ascendancy of a new management system for the global enterprise in the 21st century. This modern management system will consist of people, processes, and technologies unified and optimized to achieve higher levels of performance and accountability. It will empower individuals to make decisions and take action on their own; define management processes to support increasingly decentralized organizational structures; and include technology that supports people and processes day to day while providing a platform for long-term business growth.
Central to this modern management system is a way of organizing and providing access to information I call Information Democracy. Information Democracy is a principle of equality that demands actionable insight for all. When it is achieved, everyone in even the largest organizations has all the information they need to make decisions without having to rely on someone from Information Technology (IT) to give it to them and without being filtered or censored by management. At the heart of Information Democracy is the ability of everyone to access data, turn it into knowledge and insight through analysis, and share that insight with others.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization will recognize what I've just described as a radical departure from how information is used—and sometimes abused—in organizations today. Too often, information is locked away in complex systems accessible only to experts and reserved for an elite few, making it hard for the people who are primarily responsible for managing performance in a business day to day to get their jobs done.
