Collaborative development of performance indicators for IT applications

Designing performance indicators for measuring the value of IT supported processes is an important and recurring task in controlling and management. Involving different stakeholders and perspectives in the development of an evoked set of performance indicators is the key to improve the quality and acceptance of performance measures. We apply an approach for designing repeatable processes for the development of such performance indicators as high-value collaborative tasks using techniques of the collaboration engineering. We show how this collaboration engineering approach can be designed (building on the collaboration process design approach by Kolfschoten et al. [Ko06a]) and how it needs to be extended for designing a performance measurement tool for IT applications. The case describes the development process within a multinational industrial company for a reporting application. It shows that the approach is promising to avoid classical problems of the performance measurement, e.g. conflicting interests of various stakeholders. The developed concept provides a collaborative approach for companies to develop key performance indicators in a politically challenging environment and to generate a valid performance measurement tool. The results suggest that the outcome of the workshop provides a broad variety of indicators, which represent different aspects of benefits of the application. The use of collaboration engineering approaches for the field of performance measurement delivers promising results and offers interesting options for further research, i.e. standardization potentials for collaborative performance tool development and requirements of corporate environments.