The issues around how organisations measure their performance effectively are attracting increasing interest from both practitioners and from academics. In 1991 Professor Bob Eccles of Harvard Business School commented that “within the next five years every company will have to redesign how it measures its business performance.” In 1997 the US Institute of Management Accountants reported that 64% of US businesses were actively experimenting with new ways of measuring business performance. Within the last 10 years or so there has been a widely-reported “revolution” in performance measurement [1 4]. Professor Andy Neely from Cranfield University commented in 1998 that reports and articles on performance measurement (PM) had been appearing at the rate of one every five hours of every working day since 1994 and that by 1996 a new PM book was being published in the USA every two weeks. In 1998 he found over 170 000 references to PM on the Web. In 2003 we found over 355 000 references.
