Editorial

Citation

Heap, T.B.a.J. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 62 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM.07962eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 62, Issue 5.

This issue contains five papers. In our first paper de Waal and Kourtit carry out an empirical study of 52 staff within 17 Dutch, mainly public sector, organisations to establish the reasons for implementing performance measurement and management (PMM) systems and identify the advantages and disadvantages that flow from these systems in practice. The authors quite rightly point out that we need to know more about why PMM systems are implemented in practice and what they actually deliver – this will enable us to ascertain whether the reasons and benefits espoused in the literature actually match up with practice. The paper does usefully provide answers as to why organisations have implemented PMM and the benefits they have secured. Despite the relatively small sample size, this is a very valuable benchmark study that could be replicated more widely and repeated in future.

Meeting the increasing demand for welfare services, namely health care, social services and education, out of scarce resources is a key concern in today's austere economic times. Innovation to improve performance in welfare services is moving up the governmental and public sector agendas. In this issue's second paper, Sillanpää shows how we can measure the impact of welfare services and help evaluate the effectiveness of innovation in such services. The author introduces a two-level framework where impacts are measured at system and individual levels. The framework is applied to two Finnish cases: one is concerned with housing for the homeless and the other is about helping disabled people out of institutions and to get them living in the community. Sillanpää's study seems useful in extending our grip on this area of growing importance, by establishing how to measure the performance of welfare services.

In the third paper Maucher and Hoffmann argue that much attention is focused on measuring and achieving organisational savings on day-to-day purchases, such as raw materials, but infrequent, often large-scale, purchases of capital equipment do not receive the same level of scrutiny. They set out to remedy the gaps in the theory and the empirical data by way of three case studies drawn from manufacturing industry. The authors take the findings from the case studies and build a conceptual model of the factors that determine how savings can be measured in a specific context. They identify a number of challenges that need to be addressed if improvements are to be made in savings measurement of capital equipment purchases.

According to the author of our next paper, Ben Hadj Salem-Mhamdia, the phrase “software ecosystem” refers to a networked community of organisations with a common interest in a particular software technology. To survive the ecosystem has to be in a healthy state, and healthiness has become used as an overall performance measure for such an ecosystem. The author designs a measurement system comprised of five dimensions which are then expanded to 22 performance indicators. He then carried out a survey of 150 organisations comprising a software ecosystem based in Tunisia, and achieved a 40 per cent response rate. The results show the frequency and effectiveness of use by organisations of individual performance indicators; and their use is broken down across different categories of organisation type.

Our last paper starts from the position that change and its management are of increasing attention to managers given the rapid change encountered within business and its environment. The authors, Parker, Charlton, Ribeiro and Pathak argue that change initiatives could be more fruitfully treated as projects; and managed more systematically according to well-established project management approaches, such as PMBoK and Prince2. This seems like such a straightforward, common sense suggestion that one wonders why it hasn’t received a great deal of attention before.

Tom Burgess and John Heap