Balanced Score Card Technology: The Enabler

Strategic maps are the blueprints for the design of balanced score cards while technology makes it happen. Market feedback is faster today as e-commerce throws up data in real time. Equally, several decisions such as those pertaining to pricing, including raw material costs or competitors' price cuts need rapid response.

On the other hand, companies expand the size of their databases as they increase the number of metrics they evaluate. A more critical requirement is that the information is communicated to employees at all levels as quickly as possible and is customized for their specific requirements. The information needs to be drawn from its sources with an acceptable degree of accuracy in measurement and processed in time to be useful for action. Information technology becomes a pressing requirement once the strategic map and the associated parameters for assessing performance for balanced score card have been determined. According to one recent survey, 21% of companies had adopted business intelligence technologies in the sales domain, 19% in finance while the lowest rate of adoption is in human capital management at 8%.

A host of new technologies, with the center of gravity being a performance dashboard, help companies to manage their content, aggregate the information in a central store, use it for applications and customize for each user. Information technologies, specifically enterprise content and document management solutions, data warehouses, web services, messaging software, portals, business intelligence software help companies to complete the value chain from managing information and converting it into knowledge. The performance dashboard is the lynchpin as it helps a company to remain connected with all its employees and is the means to turn knowledge into strategic action.

The successful working of the balanced score card depends on the alignment of the strategic maps with the information flow of the company, its business processes and its people. This has to be done all across the enterprise without losing time. In the past, information was not liquid as it was scattered over several different systems but this is beginning to change with increasing use of web services to integrate applications and databases. Similarly, delays in processing of data have been overcome as analytical software is used to display information on dashboards. The response time is also lowered as the same data is available to all the stakeholders in the decision-making process.

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