The ability to be able to monitor the influences on your organisation is an essential part of ensuring the business is continuing to make the right decisions, both today and for the future.

We spend a lot of effort as senior managers developing strategies, a large proportion of it based on business experience and managerial instinct. It is fundamental that we support this is by hard data on a regular basis.

Many of our clients now have a process which highlights what information needs to be gathered, how to sustain it as part of the regular way of working, avoiding data avalanche, and then use it as a benchmark for strategic and tactical planning.

Lets briefly look at these categories in turn:

Overall - We use the benchmarking approach as a tool which is not aimed at negating business instinct and managerial experience, but provides a structured analysis when comparing the performance of the business to the competition or world's best practice. The structuring of this analysis will provide a firmer foundation to identifying how good activities of the business are, relative to industry best practice.

External - The key to this issue is to make this a part of the day to day activities so that the customer and supplier doesn't perceive it as gimmicky but as a genuine attempt to identify how we are doing and how can we get better.

Our approach dealing with the external perspective focuses jointly upon the hard facts of product and service and also as important the customers perception of what we do to him.

Internal - We also recognise that without continuous attention to the internal issues in our organisation we will find it difficult to know what exactly is going on.

We use a variety of measurements derived from specific questionnaires, focus groups, interviews and management information systems to ascertain the issues and atmosphere within the organisation, whether these be shareholders, employees or our colleagues.

The essence of what we are trying to do here is to leave our clients with the ability to measure in a different way on a sustainable basis to help prevent problems from occurring - not having to firefight when they happen.

Measurement focuses attention where it is most needed, the key is to enable the organisation to drive the numbers in the right direction - in our experience it is critical to overall success. Remember:

What gets measured gets done!