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Introduction
Great attention has been paid to performance management (PM) issues by academic and business communities in recent years. The number of publications in this area reveals the importance of managing performance in organizations. Reports and articles on this topic have been published at the rate of one every 5 hours between 1994 and 2002. Internet searches reveal more than 12 million sites dedicated to business performance management (BPM) ([40] Marr and Schiuma, 2003) and this number is growing by day.
Neely estimated that between 1994 and 1996, some 3,615 articles on performance measurement were published. In 1996, books on the subject appeared at a rate of one every two weeks in USA alone ([21] Folan and Browne, 2005). The past 15 years have seen significant research and developments in the field of performance measurement, resulting in the generation of various models, frameworks and methodologies by practitioners, consultants and academics. Among them, "Performance Prism" introduced by [1] Adams and Neely (2000) offers a new approach towards organizations' performance. This framework includes five inter-related aspects:
Stakeholders satisfaction; who are the organization's key stakeholders and what do they want and need?
Stakeholders contribution; what contributions does the organization require from its stakeholders?
Strategies; what strategies does the organization have to put in place to satisfy the wants and needs of these key stakeholders?
Processes; what critical processes does the organization need to operate and enhance these strategies?
Capabilities; what capabilities does the organization need to operate and enhance these processes?
[46] Neely et al. (2002) argue that one of the greatest fallacies of measurement design is that performance measures should be derived from strategies. It is the wants and needs of stakeholders that must be considered first and consequently the strategies can be formulated.
The measures related to the mentioned facets accompanied by their results, trends, targets, standards, initiatives and action plans are included in scorecards to facilitate managing performance. Measures are connected with each other through sets of hypothetical relationships called "success map".
This framework is best suited for the organizations for which creating stakeholder value is first priority. Also considerable additional levels of detail developed for each of the facets ensure that the framework is comprehensive, enabling all measures to be mapped on to it...