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Balanced Scorecard Design: Creating a Customer-centric Culture
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This white paper outlines the issues faced by BI operational staff in maintaining high quality of
BI information, and discusses technologies that have the potential to dramatically raise the
reliability and quality of BI information, improve how BI teams use their time and resources
to deliver rapid ROI and free resources to focus on answering business questions based on
reliable and meaningful data.
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Using the BSC process to create customer-focused objectives
Regardless of whether your organization’s strategy, mission, vision and values are clearly defined or whether they are painfully absent, the BSC process can help clarify, communicate, and measure them in ways that will help weave the strategy (and the execution of that strategy) into the fabric of the organization. In many respects, gaining agreement on the objectives and measures in the customer perspective is the most important part of the scorecard process.
As you begin wrestling with these customer-oriented objectives, it is essential that you repeatedly ask yourself, questions like:
- “Is this what the customer cares about?”
- “Does this define our unique customer value proposition?”
- “Does this reflect our strategy?” or “Is there a strategy implied in this objective?”
If you don’t have a clear customer-centric strategy, then it may be valuable to do some market research, analyze your past sales patterns, or otherwise gather information to guide your strategy formulation. The services of a strategy consultant (either with specific expertise in your vertical or with a solid facilitation process) may also prove valuable at this stage. It can be valuable to segment your clients into various profiles and to do your best to analyze things like the profitability of various market segments and how different customer segments align with your mission. It may be difficult to acquire high-quality information for this part of the process, so in some cases, experienced executives and staff may end up formulating hypotheses based on their experience and collective wisdom. Regardless of how much or little analytical information you have, the process of defining customer-centric objectives and measures should be an enlightening one.
Once you have a set of draft objectives for a scorecard, it is helpful to leverage collaborative technologies to gain feedback from a broader audience on the appropriateness of the objectives, the implications of focusing on them, or other comments that could influence the final selection of the official objectives on the scorecard. It is important not to jump too quickly to discussing measures. The initial discussions should focus on the strategy and the objectives in the customer perspective.
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