Moving Strategy Forward : Merging the Balanced Scorecard and Business Intelligence

Nancy Williams is the vice president of DecisionPath Consulting and co-author of “The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence.” You can reach her at nancy.williams@ decisionpath.com. by Bob Paladino & Nancy Williams W hat information does your corporate leadership team rely upon to conduct its meetings? Do you use leading indicators that reveal progress toward achieving strategic goals — or do you rely on legacy systems containing lagging indicators such as financial results? Are management or operating review meetings dominated by discussions about who has the most current data and which report is most accurate? Companies become handicapped by limited, low-quality data views when they allow the information that is already available, and is easiest to gather, determine how they manage the business. It makes sense that an organization should first make decisions about its strategies and information requirements, then subsequently align information assets to support strategy management. But many companies continue to operate in reverse. When approached as a means to support corporate strategy, business intelligence (BI) solutions can enhance performance management programs’ ability to optimize value to the organization. A business that is pursuing Balanced Scorecard strategic alignment can use BI solutions for trend analysis, predictive analytics, customer data integration, scorecards and dashboards, and data mining. We have found through our separate research initiatives that the most successful organizations leverage proven performance management methodologies such as strategy maps and the Balanced Scorecard, then choose metrics based on the strategic objectives set through those methodologies, and finally deploy business intelligence solutions to gather the data necessary for performance optimization. Moving Strategy Forward: Merging the Balanced Scorecard and Business Intelligence