One of my favorite sites when it comes to “performance management” is http://www.12manage.com/index.html. It is a perfect example of the global effort to sort through the confusion around “managing” performance. However, since I’ve been working in business since 1972, my favorite part of the site is:

http://www.12manage.com/methods_rockart_csfs_kpis.html

This short essay reminds us that the core of managing performance is embodied in two concepts that are over 20 or 40 years old: Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Furthermore, it reminds us that both organizations and an organization’s goals are hierarchical in nature.

This natural hierarchical nature of managing performance is exactly the foundation we used to code The Corporate Management Suite. Furthermore, since organizations and their goals consist of multiple hierarchical relationships linked vertically, horizontally and diagonally across the organization, we created the fundamental ability to link anything in one hierarchy to anything in another hierarchy. This mirrors the way that CARs in Sales Administration may be linked to Engineering Change Orders in production.

The fact is, however, that representing the true hierarchical nature of organizations and performance aims is not an easy programmatic task to accomplish without severe software performance costs.

The method taught and used until early in this decade for the programmatic creation of hierarchies was a method called the “adjacency list” method. In the internet age, the big problem that people saw with the adjacency list hierarchy model was simple: the larger the hierarchy, the slower it was to represent across the web because all of the data from the tip to the root of the structure had to be pulled through the pipe to get to the client browser. The result was often a several minute delay after logging in to a “scorecard” application before you could start working on the data.

Fortunately, when Spider started coding performance management software, a new method for building hierarchies using “nested sets” had started getting a lot of attention in the literature. A good example is http://www.codeproject.com/database/nestedsets.asp which was published in 2003. However, the best known source for the concept is Joe Celko and his book “SQL for Smarties”. In fact, you can find articles in 1996 where Joe talks about the concept, http://www.dbmsmag.com/9603d06.html.

The good news is that Spider incorporated the methodology in the core of our software from day 1. The result is software that deploys in assessment situations like the MNF in Iraq where there are up to 600 “scorecards” with n level structures linked both to documents and actions, yet calling the information for any one pulls no more information across the net, than would be called in a simple 6 level small business hierarchy!

When it comes to speed and performance across the web in the 21st century, it is all about how you represent the hierarchies.