words from Azhar

Major benefits include increased structure and shared objectives; these often lead to greater financial return. It allows organisations to become more functional and enabled. For specific programs, a balanced scorecard can raise the profile of key projects, which can help with funding and internal support. It's also possible to use the strategic map that a balanced scorecard approach creates to help guide programs toward success. And it's catching on.

The balanced scorecard methodology, an outgrowth of prior measurement and management methodologies like total quality management (TQM), has existed for decades, but it was formalised in the early 1990s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. Kaplan and Norton not only gave it a formal name but also put structure around the way organisations can measure how well they are functioning and how to predict future performance. Basically, it's a way to map and translate complex business information into something that's understandable to everyone. The methodology starts with targets defined by the organisation, followed by scorecard measures. These usually include both corporate targets and business unit targets, which are then honed into individual measures and targets. It's a very flexible approach, designed to be adapted to any organisation's needs. And virtually anything can be measured.

When implementing BI for the companies,first they should analyse the way they make decisions and consider the information that executives need to know for making more confident and more rapid decisions, as well as how they'd like that information presented to them (for example, as a report, a chart, online, hard copy). Discussions of decision making will drive what information companies need to collect, analyse and publish in their BI systems. Good BI systems need to give context. It's not enough that they report sales were X yesterday and Y a year ago that same day. They need to explain what factors influencing the business caused sales to be X one day and Y on the same date the previous year. Like so many technology projects, BI won’t yield returns if users feel threatened by, or are sceptical of, the technology and refuse to use it as a result. And when it comes to something like BI, which, when implemented strategically, ought to fundamentally change how companies operate a...