By the year 1990, computer technologies were introduced which led to an improvement in the Business Intelligence. Customer relationship management also went through an improvement and advanced techniques of management, along with new technology, improved the reporting, analysis and planning in businesses. These latest development led to an integrated methodology termed as Business Performance Management. Basically, it is a holistic approach towards strategic planning.

Gartner research introduced the entire concept of Business Performance Management in the year 2001, which is also known as Corporate Performance Management at times. Business Performance Management describes the methodologies, systems, processes and metrics required for the management of performance in an organization. Some of the major characteristics of Business Performance Management are complete integration, support of collaboration, automated processing of data, focus on exceptions and analytical insight.

Before the Information Age of 20^th century, companies had to collect data from several non-automated resources, which was quite troublesome and time consuming. In the lack of computing resource for analyzing the data properly, most of the commercial decisions were made on the basis of pure intuition. As companies started automating their systems, an increased number of data started becoming available. However, it was difficult to collect data because of shortage of infrastructure meant for data exchange or because of incompatibilities between the systems. Generation of data even took months, leading to long term strategic planning and decision making. However, short term decisions yet needed to be taken on intuition.

Because of increasing standards, technologies and automated systems, vast amounts of data started becoming available. Improved Enterprise Application Integration tools also increased the speed to collecting data. Business Intelligence became an art to sieve through huge amounts of data, taking out useful data from it and turning that data into knowledge on which needed action could be taken.

Business Performance Management or Corporate Performance Management or Enterprise Performance Management have same meanings, which means that they are synonyms. All of them have proved to be extremely helpful in improving the business performance of an enterprise, including its management, employees, workers, customers and clients.