KPI Management within an IT Consultancy Firm: A Single Case Study about Business Control at PdB

Abstract: Knowledge is becoming a basis for growing wealth, where successful firms produce and spread new knowledge, which result in new technologies and products. A lot of knowledge is provided by the IT industry, which is an industry that lately has been subject for high competition where for instance many large-volume tasks have been offshored to India. Existing literature argue that the increased global competition has increased the need for companies to have great competencies in all of the organizational activities, in combination with a clear strategy and effective management; also referred to as business control. During the last decades concepts and tools such as Benchmarking and The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), has come to play a vital role within this field. PdB data systems AB is a medium sized IT consultancy firm who provides a variety of IT based services and solutions. The company has a history of performing both positive and negative results during the last decade, even though the market conditions were considered as very promising during this period. PdB’s CEO believes that it could be of interest to evaluate their current internal state in terms of the used measures and KPIs, in order to remain in a stable and competitive position within the market. Furthermore, the company is interested in turning their business control more externally, with a focus on PdB’s performance relative to the IT consultancy market. The established research question that allowed us to investigate this case was: “Considering current internal state of PdB and the industry conditions, what areas of the business should PdB’s KPIs be focused upon”. The study was conducted through a qualitative single case study with an inductive approach, where data was collected at our case company through several interviews and corporate documents. This enabled us to get an accurate picture of the internal state and the used KPIs at PdB. In addition, our case company was compared toward the IT industry by a set of chosen KPIs. The collected internal and external data was then analyzed against an extensive literature review. Consequently, this enabled us to highlight important areas of improvements at PdB, for instance concerning efficiency and future development of the company. One conclusion is that PdB has a considerable good business control at the moment. However, we discovered a couple of areas that lack vital KPIs that are connected to the strategy and vision. An answer to the research question was provided by using the Balanced Scorecard as a framework, which allowed us to provide aligned objectives, measures, targets and initiatives that can help our case company to ensure a correct focus of their business.