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Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change

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As one of the founders and thought leaders in the BI space, anything Howard Dresner writes is a must ready for BI practitioners. The case studies he presents are interesting, inspiring, and sometimes frustrating. Frustrating, because so much about BI is about the culture and the people, which is beyond the control of a BI team. The case studies remind us that BI is not just a set of technologies that get put in place. Getting value out of BI is ongoing, a journey. I also liked the framework for assessing where a company currently stands on their performance culture versus their vision and what's possible with BI. In particular, this book is a great read for business people and executives who want to use data and facts for better performance!

Howard Dresner touched on a crucial point in this book: before an organization can succeed, it first must create a culture that values performance, transparency, and accountability.

He said when he began work on his book, his intention was to capture and present best practices of performance management, but along the way, he realized that the missing element that determines success or failure really boils down to the notion of culture. Just as well that he decided to write about performance-directed culture, because he wrote a great and insightful book.

In the book, Howard explains the Performance Culture Maturity Model, a comprehensive model created by him to understand the way of organizations have taken in their search for better performance. The model has six dimensions and four levels of achievement, where the four levels of maturity determine how mature an organization is in each of six performance-directed culture criteria.

He used the Performance Culture Maturity Model as a filter to help select four organizations, and wrote well detailed case studies about them. He wrote one chapter for each organization, showing the issues and efforts to build and sustain a performance-directed culture, and also sharing their setbacks and successes.

I completely agree with his definition: "The performance-directed culture is a journey, not a destination."

The book is an outstanding reference on how to build a culture of performance in the organizations, and is highly recommended reading for everyone involved with performance management.

At first I worried that Dresner- being the 'father of BI' (he coined the term) would write in the tech jargon of the field- but Dresner's book couldn't be more accessible and interesting, even to those without a BI background, myself included. He argues that success today is not just about technology, it's about the readiness of a business culture to leverage that technology. He calls this position the `performance culture maturity model.' The case studies in this book are fantastic, I can't believe the complete access that the he was given, and we all become beneficiaries in learning from the mistakes and successes of these companies. A must read.

I found Mr. Dresner's book to be very insightful. He provides a well thought out roadmap for assessing a company's performance management readiness and describes the steps for putting it into action. The case studies use real-world examples to show how it's done.

The key sentence for me is on page 149: ". . . their stories are all about change: how to create and foster change; how to manage and sustain change; and how to overcome impediments to it."

A worthy book by any measure.

What Howard has done with his research is identify a rarely considered item that is crucial to a successful BI implementation. Having been a part of several BI projects, the successful ones are always with organizations that recognize that they are ready to implement BI for the sake of providing information value, not just to have a fancy reporting system.

The case examples Howard uses are diverse, the common-thread being cultural issues faced by high performing organizations are similar, even though their business structures are not. Both business and non-profit organizations are profiled here, showing that striving for performance excellence in not unique to the business world.

It was interesting read about the journeys these different groups took in their quest for performance. It shows that a performance culture can be attained by companies wanting to make a difference. I read the book over 2 days, soaking in the lessons contained in side.
All in all, a great book with lots of valuable ideas.