Creating a Scorecard

A scorecard is a business intelligence tool used to record an organization's strategic business model and implement it into the daily agenda. The scorecard sets the stage for future business goals and lays out a plan of attack to reach them.

When creating a scorecard, a business and its employees are evaluated to identify opportunities for improvement. Balanced scorecards provide a framework for how a business should be run and enable stakeholders to monitor their expectations.

Read the top 10 reasons for selecting InetSoft as your BI partner.

Effective Scorecard Design

First and foremost, to be a useful, a scorecard must track the right key performance indicators. The ultimate goal of creating a scorecard is to identify a select number of business metrics and assign objectives to them. When referred to later on it should be possible to reach a solid conclusion regarding performance versus expectations.

Methods for creating a scorecard have evolved many times since they became a popular BI tool. Today there are four main components to consider before creating one:

A destination statement
A strategic linkage model outlining how one plans to achieve said goals
A definition for each goal
A definition for each measurement

Once these four elements have been carefully considered and laid out by management, one can begin creating a scorecard.

The destination statement defines the final goals that an organization is attempting to reach by creating a scorecard in the first place..

The strategic linkage model is a cause-and-effect outline of how an organization will ultimately reach an end goal. This is typically a strategy map that links activities to their hypothesized results.

Goal and measurement definitions are important to ensure all aspects of a business remain on the same page. These need to be clearly and concisely expressed in order align objectives with performance.

How Can InetSoft Help?

InetSoft's Style Intelligence software offers unique capabilities for data mashup, enabling data from disparate sources to be combined for a unified view of corporate performance. This is especially important for management scorecarding since the key performance goals span multiple departments and operational systems.

InetSoft’s drag and drop software allows developers and even end-users to quickly create sophisticated scorecards and dashboards. With intuitive point-and-click capabilities, managers can drill into scorecard metrics to identify root causes of performance problems for faster responses.