The balanced scorecard
A strategic planning and management tool that reflects organisation’s strategy and helps gaining control of the data.
One approach to integrate diverse data into a single system – Specific, measurable goals from different perspectives
Rationale for the BSC
- Focus
- Balance
- Assessment
- Intelligibility
The Balanced Scorecard helps organisations translate strategy to something actionable and measurable, while helping employees understand how they can contribute to the organization success.
The Balanced Scorecard Institute’s framework, Nine Steps to Success™, is a practical roadmap to developing and deploying e balanced scorecard.
Charles Savage (Fifth Generation Management) notes that:
“As information passes up and down the organization, there is a strong tendency to manage and massage it. A function is often more interested in making itself look good than in telling things the way they are.
In too many companies, even before the computer, we have had managed information systems. The computer has not changed this pattern of interaction between levels.
Usually MIS attempts to mirror the configuration of steep hierarchies, so they suck up information from lower levels, summarize it, and provide top management with executive decision support systems.
These decisions are then communicated back down through the hierarchy to lower levels….
Is this where managed information systems are taking us?
Will these systems be used to ‘micromanage’ the plants and their functions? …. if little trust exists between levels or between functions in steep hierarchies, there is going to be a greater interest in managing or massaging the information that is passed vertically between boxes.
Is it possible that the wrong questions are being asked in the MIS arena?
The more appropriate questions may deal with leveraging knowledge rather than managing information. The challenge is to see the interrelationship of multiple patterns.
Unfortunately, traditional managed information systems tend to remove all the interesting rough edges and sanitize the information so the important patterns do not show up.”
Balanced scorecard deployment
Modern information technology systems can support balanced scorecard deployment. However, the big implementation problems are people problems: change of managers’ perceptions and in the employee culture.
CHK-154 Implementing the balanced scorecard.pdf
Putting the Balanced Scorecard to Work – Harvard Business Review
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