Information Technology Strategic Goal Alignment
This week, I am discussing some core concepts of Information Technology Enterprise Management Success. I have written on various topics like this before as part of my IT Management Tools and Productivity series.
As I said earleir in the week here and here, though I stray far and wide in my management consultant product usage, I do find myself frequently coming back to one that I learned from FranklinCovey. Monday, I wrote about their concept for goal making that they call Wildly Important Goals or WIGs. It is part of their The 4 Disciplines of Execution™ organizational consulting program. On Tuesday, I wrote about their second discipline in this series which is to make compelling scoreboards to inform the workforce on how you are doing
Their third discipline is that lofty goals made at the corporate level must get broken down into smaller and smaller, executable portions through a process called alignment. Here I break with their methods and choose instead to use those of an alternate program called The Balanced Scorecard approach.
One of my all time favorite IT Management Tools is Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC). I find that it provides a very effective means for integrating the goals and objectives of the Chief Information Officer and IT Services Departments into the overall construct of their business.
Wikipedia has a great article on BSC. This is how they summarize it:
“The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.
By focusing not only on financial outcomes but also on the operational, marketing and developmental inputs to these, the Balanced Scorecard helps provide a more comprehensive view of a business, which in turn helps organizations act in their best long-term interests. This tool is also being used to address business response to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
Organizations were encouraged to measure, in addition to financial outputs, those factors which influenced the financial outputs. For example, process performance, market share / penetration, long term learning and skills development, and so on.”
The Balanced Scorecard Institute is another great references with pages of information available to read online.
Kaplan and Norton were professors at the Harvard Business School when they wrote the initial book on the subject. Following its success they founded the Palladium Group to specialize in consulting associated with executing the BSC methodology in real organizations. The Palladium Group offers consulting, training, and education services to enable full implementation. You can certainly learn a lot about the techniques by reading the growing library of books that the team has written on the subject.
It is a little difficult to explain the effectiveness of the BSC method in a small blog post, but it can have transformational benefits for your group. Essentially, it is a process by which you translate your organization’s highest goals into executable, measurable, and correctable action steps. Best of all, since it facilitates goal accomplishment in the financial, people, customers, and learning it prevents business thought that ignores the typical competitive advantages and value inputs from information technology. It also applies equally well to public, private, non-profit, and governmental organizations and I find it to be one of the few business performance management tools that functions equally well when profit is not the driving factor.
The Deposit Insurance Corporation of Ontario has a wonderful website demonstrating their Balanced Scorecard implementation. You can click here to see an example of one of their scorecards at full browser resolution.
If you are looking for an effective, business proven, academically sound method for aligning your IT and CIO shops with the overall objectives of your organization, I recommend you give the Balanced Scorecard method a serious look. I have seen it used effectively for a number of IT organizations.
Tell me what you think of this series. Please suggest IT Management Tools that you have found effective. Have you used or seen used this one before?
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin
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