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If you answer yes to any of these questions then you can benefit from implementing a Balanced Scorecard.
Devised by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in a number of articles published in the Harvard Business Review between 1992 and 1996, the Balanced Scorecard is a business management concept that transforms both financial and non-financial data into a detailed roadmap that helps an enterprise measure performance and meet both near and long-term objectives.
Performance measurement in general and the balanced scorecard in particular, attempt to address a key management issue: companies often fail to turn strategy into action. This is the conclusion of a survey conducted by Renaissance Solutions in association with Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School. The belief that a clear, action oriented understanding of an organization's strategy could significantly influence that organization's success was held by ninety percent of surveyed companies. However, in the same survey, less than sixty percent of senior managers and less than ten percent of the total company believed that they had a clear understanding of their company's strategy. In addition, less than thirty percent of senior managers who understood their company's strategy believed that it had been effectively implemented.
Today, global leaders are using automated Balanced Scorecards to track, manage and measure their strategic and operational performance. An automated balanced scorecard solution provides numerous key operational benefits, including:
Over 90% of organizations have not effectively aligned their strategy at all levels of the organization. The result is an organization that is not operating at maximum efficiency, typically leading to less than optimal performance as well as missed opportunities. With a Balanced Scorecard, the corporation, down to each organizational unit and even to the individual level, can understand the key performance indicators that they have control of and responsibility for and understand the relationship to the overall success of their organization.
The Balanced Scorecard provides management with visibility into operations and issues of all business units and enables them to easily monitor and understand how organizations are progressing against plan. However, a truly effective scorecard also goes a step further and enables organizations to implement and track key initiatives for addressing problem areas or pursuing business opportunities. By having visibility across organizations, senior management can also provide more visibility across organizations, and, when appropriate, more effectively cross-utilize resources.
An automated Balanced Scorecard that has been deployed across the enterprise offers an organization an unsurpassed communications platform for feedback and information sharing. Often looked upon as "the strategic knowledge management system" within an organization, a scorecard focuses on proactive communication for addressing problems earlier and pursuing business opportunities faster and more effectively than traditional management models.
Most organizations have significant investments in Data Warehouses, Data Marts as well as OLTP and ERP systems, such as SAP, Peoplesoft and Baan. These back-office systems are the primary source of data collected within an enterprise. A Balanced Scorecard solution, as the strategic analytical application within an organization, should work in harmony with existing sources of data, extracting and packaging this information and sharing it as part of the scorecard.
Gentia Balanced Scorecard is a packaged solution which provides all the functionality required to build and maintain a large number of balanced scorecards in any organization. These scorecards can range from a corporate scorecard to a personal scorecard for each employee.
