Certainly, youıve been preached at enough about the importance of the planning phase of any project. Itıs a process that is often overlooked or, at best, given the short end of the stick. We are all familiar with the temptation to build an entire system based on a nifty tool or a cool magazine article rather than on what the users really need.
The difficulty lies often not in technology but in communication. Projects are made up of people, all of whom want different things and have different motivations and styles of communication. This has given rise to a thriving consulting community, outsiders who enter the group to play the role of listener, family therapist, and, oh yes, expert technical advisor.
Where there are problems, thereıs money to be made. As users, weıve understood these problems for a while. Consultants have, too. The slowest to catch on is the vendor community, which is just beginning to see the dollar signs. A new market you should be hearing more about in the next few months is that of balanced scorecard applications. Balanced scorecard is a management system first introduced by Robert Kaplan, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and David Norton, president of Renaissance Solutions Inc., in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article. In the balanced scorecard model, a companyıs long-term business strategy is deeply integrated into its technology systems via measurable objectives and feedback loops. The balanced scorecard approach gives you a balanced view of all areas of your business, from how customers and shareholders perceive you to those areas where you excel and those where you need improvement.
In this way, every employee gains a deeper understanding of his or her contribution to the overall organization. In more realistic terms, employees can mark their work against predefined corporate standards and quotas to determine how soon they should be looking for another job or how much they should ask for when their next review comes around.
More recently, Norton collaborated with Gentia Software Inc. to create the just-announced Renaissance Balanced Scorecard, a packaged solution for automating the balanced scorecard model throughout the enterprise. CorVu Corp. followed suit with its own implementation of a balanced scorecard. The Meta Group also responded to the Gentia and CorVu announcements by promoting a four-part evaluation framework called the META Group Business Performance Management (BPM) solution. All three groups have one common denominator: integrating realistic, measurable objectives (determined by system data) into your system to determine quickly how successful your company is meeting its goals.
The balanced scorecard approach has taken off strongly within the business intelligence sector. Why? Because the data warehouse infrastructure is ideal for balanced scorecards. Data warehouses contain all the information necessary to measure your business. The data is already being sucked into the data warehouse; you donıt even have to go out and collect it.
If this approach sounds somewhat familiar, thatıs because it is. It takes up where management by objectives leaves off. The difference is that balance scorecards go beyond reports and PowerPoint presentations and are integrated into the actual systems on which the companies run. Expect to see a lot more news about products specific to balanced scorecards in the near future. Also, keep an eye out for vendors claiming to support balanced scorecards but who have nothing tangible to show for it. From where I sit, balanced scorecards arenıt necessarily just a new buzzword ı they promote a valid method of establishing realistic goals and measuring performance against them. How vendors adopt this approach within their own product offerings will be key to its success or relegation to the hype heap. We shall see.