Strategy Management & Scorecarding

Scorecards provide an organization with an ideal way for executing and controlling its' strategy by tracking the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in comparison to corresponding targets and as such enabling visibility in every direction. Furthermore scorecarding helps in aligning and empowering the different teams and departmental layers which are present in an organization, by effectively communicating goals and their actual performance consistently.

A typical Business Intelligence architecture can be depicted as a kind of pyramid:
  • at the base of the pyramid, query & reporting tools can be found, showing what has happened
  • in the belly of the pyramid, OLAP tools are situated, enabling more analytical functionalities oriented towards why something did happen
  • the top level, finally, is reserved for Scorecarding and Strategy Management tools, visualizing how well we are doing by comparing actual performance against objectives or goals.
Scorecarding and Strategy Management thus is complementary to the other layers found in a Business Intelligence architecture. Within a scorecard application, one can quickly browse those metrics which require more attention based on stoplights and trends shown. Additionally one can investigate in more detail certain KPI's by performing multi-dimensional analysis via OLAP tools. Finally, standard reports can be used to get to the most granular details of those measures which contribute to the definition of a certain KPI.
 
Scorecarding solutions as such embrace the following components:
  • a mission & vision transformed into strategy maps & objectives
  • cause & effect relationships
  • choosing the right Key' PI's in the function of the organizational strategy which are translated into actual measures which need to be tracked
  • appropriate targets & variances
  • ownership & accountability
  • metadata, calculation & definition
  • actions & milestones for closing the gap between measured actuals & their pre-set targets
  • visualization
All of this is preferably supported by an integrated (near-) atomic data warehouse layer which both gathers the actual atomic measures (which combined make up the different actual KPI's) from different data sources, but furthermore gathers the target values from the planning & budgeting applications. In this way, a true corporate Performance Management architecture can be established where the past & future are connected.

element61 can help in automating the Scorecard & Strategy Management process, which is not limited to the scorecard applications themselves, but which knows extensions to the underlying data warehouse layer & planning applications.

  • Scorecard automation: Next to the definition of the scorecard, the scorecard also needs to be automated. This implies amongst others: an assessment of the technical environment, identification of future business users & their corresponding roles, user requirements analysis, the definition of the data sources for all actual & target measures (most likely involving planning & budgeting applications), investigation of the fit for purpose capabilities of those data sources, source to scorecard data feed, definition of the business user interface, definition of different scorecards in function of the different audiences, testing, roll-out, training & support. Next to that, the right attention needs to be given to a supporting & integrated data warehouse & planning architecture.
     
  • Scorecard tool selection: element61 provides elementary for scorecard solution selection. This describes a unique approach to choosing the appropriate scorecard solution for your organization. The selection process takes amongst others the following into account: current infrastructure, organizational requirements, quality & maturity of the scorecard functionalities of the different tools in the selection process in terms of: strategy maps, cause & effect relationships, traffic lighting, visualization, manual data-entry, metadata, ETL, integration with other BI components

element61 has proven experience in automating Scorecarding and Strategy Management initiatives. In these projects, we not only focus on the scorecard tools, but we also address issues concerning the alignment of KPIs, the underlying infrastructure in terms of data warehouse and planning applications, data quality, the potential gap between scorecard demos and the real thing and integration between summarized KPIs and detailed information. As a start in your Scorecarding project, you can already read our insights Do's and Dont's of Implementing a Scorecard on the topic.

Contact us for more information or with your specific request.