The Glue

The Engine That Powers Balanced Scorecards

Ever wonder why some organizations are so excited about the results of their Balanced Scorecards and others decry the tool as ineffective?

Clearly, there are a number of reasons why scorecards fail, such as not having senior management buy-in, not having the top-level scorecard aligned to the strategic plan, not deploying the scorecards to all key departments, and not performing scorecard reviews on a monthly basis to drive accountability for the proper actions.

However, even when an organization avoids all of the above pitfalls,they must have the right "engine" in place, or Balanced Scorecards still won't work.

The engine behind the scorecard framework is a well-designed system of correlated, cascaded measures. These begin with top-level lagging (or outcome) measures that track performance of the strategic plan. They cascade through to mid-level measures, on to lower-level measures, and even all the way to identified root causes of under-performing measures.

ActiveStrategy Goes Mobile (And Gets Blogged by Wall Street Journal)

At our annual Client Conference last week, we demonstrated the very first enterprise performance management application for the iPhone.

This is the first ActiveStrategy product optimized to run natively on a mobile device. So why did we pick the iPhone?  There are several key reasons:

1. The user-friendly, large display shows our Dashboards and Scorecards far better than any other mobile device can.
2. Since this will be a native app on the iPhone (versus an application optimized for a web-enabled mobile device), executives can view it anywhere -- even offline. Since so many of our users are high-level executives who tend to be on-the-go, they can prep for business reviews anywhere -- even at 30,000 feet.
3. Apple recently announced their enterprise roadmap, which we believe is going to make it a far more viable option for business users in the very near future.
4. Everyone loves the iPhone. We wouldn't be surprised if a few executives out there are just looking for a reason to tell their IT shop to support them. So this can be their reason!