In legal circles, the assignment of responsibility is an integral part of strategy. When lawyers look at behavior, they have a deep desire to isolate responsibility to ‘single belly buttons’. Legal strategy often involves creating plausible deniability. A great lawyer tells you how to keep your own personal behind covered. In other words, supreme clarity about responsibility is exactly how you avoid it. This is the problem with most performance management approaches. When objectives flow down from the top, they are usually divided and subdivided. Each individual in the chain ends up with what is deemed an appropriate share of the overall objectives. The idea is to simultaneously clarify individual jobs while maintaining the ability to zero in on the person or persons responsible for failure.

The very best thing you can say about Performance Management tools and systems is that they make a serious effort to have organizational progress come from the top. The focus is on organizational alignment rather than the perpetuation of internally focused initiatives. It is a solid step in the direction of building an HR function that is the heart of organizational alignment.

When focused on the performance of the business, HR can become a competitive weapon. When focused on the efficiency of internal process, HR is a boat anchor. It really, really doesn’t matter how fast or slow your overall HR processes are, how much they cost per employee or who is to blame for process inefficiencies. What matters is having the right people in the right place at the right time with the right skills and the right objectives. The actual deployment of people to work on the business problem is the only thing that matters.The rest is the land of pretend that HR is famous for occupying. In today’s organization, you are either part of the momentum or you are a drag on progress.

More than ever before, customers have gotten really smart about implementation costs. The total cost of ownership of a piece of software is driven by a combination of functionality, customer maturity, provider maturity and process sophistication. Customers are extremely wary of deals where the cost isn’t precisely controllable. So are sophisticated providers. That’s why there’s a burgeoning market for simple, single function tools. These products can be easily integrated into existing workflows without complex implementation processes. If they are simple enough, the can be installed without modifications to configuration or customization.