The importance of identifying an organisation's performance is evident throughout the
world-wide markets, the results of which are to attract future investment, increase
share value and attract high calibre employees. Therefore, it is important to consider
how an organisation's performance is measured and how it can be communicated to
the wider market i.e. how can it be understood and interpreted by the potential
investors, employees and customers. The basis of formulating performance indicators
that achieve the latter have been in operation as early as the beginning of our century
(Chandler 1997). Those performance indicators have traditionally concentrated on
finances e.g. return on investment, sales per employee, profit per unit production,
which as Sanger (1998) suggests "…financial measures are useful - but they tend to
measure the past - and they tend to measure the easily-measurable." The apparent
inadequacy of financial measures for contemporary businesses has been identified by
a number of authors, for example Johnson (1994), Crawford & Fox (1990), Hayes et
al (1988), Johnson and Kaplan (1987) to mention but few. Neely (1999) identified
that the reasons why these types of measures are criticised is because they: