Balanced Scorecard for Organisational Success

A Balanced Scorecard (BSC) evaluates businesses and provides a balanced idea regarding how well the organisation performs. The BSC framework is used by all organisations, including profit and non-profit organisations, to track, evaluate and manage the organisation's strategy. Even though the top-level management has a clear picture of the organisation's direction, studies suggest that the workforce does not understand and align with the organisational strategy and hence fails to obtain operational excellence. Implementing a balanced scorecard for better strategy planning and management will definitely lead to organisational success. There are a few questions to be asked to ensure organisational success.

• Do your employees share a common organisational vision?
• Is there a clear and measurable definition of your success?
• How will you recognise success?
• How are your employees prioritising work according to the strategy?

These questions highlight the need for a KPI management solution or a balanced scorecard in an organisation. Irrespective of their size, all organisations benefit from a balanced scorecard, which is critical to their success. Although the Balanced Scorecard was introduced almost 25 years ago, it remains vital and inevitable for organisations worldwide. A balanced scorecard is a reliable and valuable tool that helps organisations plan and implement their strategy and converts its vision, mission and strategy into measurable goals. Following are the reasons why Scorecard is termed as "balanced".

1. It maintains a balance between financial and non-financial success indicators.
2. It balances the internal needs of staff and processes with the external demands of clients and shareholders.
3. Compares past and current performance and develop improvement strategies.
4. Finally, it balances an organisation's short-term and long-term goals/objectives.

Balanced Scorecard acts as the foundation in creating a continuous improvement environment, links business strategy to measurable goals and aligns organisational strategy and efforts. In essence, the process of a Balanced Scorecard is to;

Read the benefits of a Balanced Scorecard.

• Turn vision into strategy.
• Communicate and connect strategic objectives and measures.
• Plan, set targets and align strategic initiatives.
• Improve strategic feedback and learning.

Why Digital Balanced Scorecard?

Significant changes should be brought to the old school method to stand out in this competitive world. Organisations used a paper-based solution to carry out the strategy planning and management process. However, this took a great deal of time and limited the overall view of organisational performance. Organisations can survive using the paper-based solution, but time is valuable and it should be invested wisely. Later on, organisations moved from paper-based to spreadsheets/excel format, but spreadsheets lacked the efficiency for long term process planning and execution. Though spreadsheets were not that time-consuming compared to the paper-based solution, real-time data collaboration, retrieval and data analysis were not possible; hence the holistic idea of 'Balanced Scorecard' could not work to its full potential.

Both paper-based and excel solutions could not scale up as the organisation grew as both lacked features such as:

• Real-time data visibility
• Data security
• Centralised data
• Flexibility
• Data Analytics and reports
• Advanced search, filter and sort options
• Historical data analysis
• Access on multiple devices

Organisations using paper-based or spreadsheet solutions have now moved to a more professional and digital version of Balanced Scorecard to scale up to their requirements. A digital version of the Balanced Scorecard will ease the entire strategy planning and management process.

Lean Transition Solutions have helped many organisation implement BSC solutions. Knowing an organisation's pain points in implementing and maintaining a balanced scorecard, LTS developed 'Data Point' - a Digital Balanced Scorecard. Data Point overcomes all the drawbacks that were caused by the traditional practices. Benefits of Digital Balanced Scorecard include and are not limited to:

• Better strategy map visualisation
• Communicate organisational strategy to all employees
• Increase data security
• Save time and increase productivity
• Dynamic dashboards to analyse, evaluate and visualise different KPIs
• Access to real-time data
• Align Organisational, Departmental and Individual goals
• Support business framework
• Retrieve reports on various KPIs

Data Point is more than just a Balanced Scorecard. Data Point visualises the entire business story and identifies where you are in your strategy execution journey. The Balanced Scorecard provides better organisational alignment and ensures that all departments/processes move in the same direction to achieve organisational goals. Data Point communicates and integrates with other MES and ERP Systems and auto-generates reports to make data-driven decisions. In a nutshell, Data Point is the complete solution for better strategy map visualisation and performance management.