Cambridge Business Association
Beyond the Balanced Scorecard
Book

Beyond the Balanced Scorecard

Improving Business Intelligence with Analytics

Mark Graham Brown
Productivity Press, 2007
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7

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Recommendation

Many companies can improve their performance by sharpening strategic management tools called “balanced scorecards,” says consultant Mark Graham Brown. He provides analytic refinements in his book and shows you how to build better scorecards. He explains why analytics, or multiple measures of specific operations, are superior to single-point indicators of process improvement. You need management tools that can help you assess the present and guide your way to a successful future. Brown shows you how to create multidimensional analytics that give you a deeper understanding of what you are measuring. He also shows you how to create analytics-based scorecards to manage customer relationships, staff, finance, operations and strategy. One chapter is about building an actionable scorecard that tracks external factors. Most scorecards ignore this area completely, even though external factors can have a huge impact on your company’s success. getAbstract recommends this book to professionals who want to adapt their scorecards to a more analytical approach.

Summary

Building Better Balanced Scorecards

The balanced scorecard approach to measuring organizational achievement is designed to create an applicable, useful package of various kinds of measurements, but the traits that constitute a good balanced scorecard are open to interpretation. Some companies that have used scorecards have benefited more than others. Balanced scorecards are most beneficial when they are properly tailored to a specific business, tied to its corporate goals, used organization-wide and designed to cover the concerns of multiple stakeholders, particularly employees and customers. Having a scorecard is only meaningful if you use it as the basis for making improvements. Measurements that fail to motivate are useless.

Popularized in the 1990s, the first scorecards had many flaws. Almost all of their measurements tracked past events or lagging indicators. They did not measure ethical behavior, link with company strategy and or tie compensation to important nonfinancial measures. They measured the activities of customers and staff members crudely, and they ignored vital external factors. Over time, companies in Europe and the U.S. began sharing successful improvements...

About the Author

Mark Graham Brown has spent decades helping companies, including Fortune 50 firms, improve their performance. He conducts workshops on measuring performance and is the author of two previous books, Keeping Score and Winning Score.

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