There have been so many different Bright New Buzzword ideas, in the last forty years or so, and most of them have already passed so far into history that you could shout their names in a crowded theater and nobody would know what you are talking about. That applies to programming languages, and equipment as well as new management techniques and systems.



Most of these new ideas get hyped and marketed way beyond their worth, but occasionally one shows up on the market that has a great amount of merit. A lot of these very special ideas gain popularity almost stealthily. Some are so stealthy that as they grow to groundswell proportions, nobody notices them or writes about them in the Magazine D'Idee D'Jour.

Here is such an idea. Balanced Scorecard Management, and its associated Balanced Scorecard Software constitute a new way of viewing, transforming, and running a business, no matter how big, or how small. The Balanced Scorecard framework sheds a whole new light on how you can shed new light on the formerly dark recesses of how your enterprise works. You can, with the scorecard, grade your performance daily (or more often) and adjust your activities to improve your position vis a vis your own corporate goals.

A Balanced Scorecard is used to effectively give you real-time metrics on your enterprise from several viewpoints, so as to allow you to, perhaps for the first time, get a good look at what you are doing, and how you are doing it. More than that, you can share the balanced reporting with any level of management you choose, in clear and concise terms which will allow them to grade themselves and improve their effectiveness.

The idea is fairly simple. First, you have to really understand your enterprise, on every level. - ?Oh, no! You think that's simple?? you ask. Well, it may not be simple to do, but harkening back to the initial days of the first baby steps of Office Automation, we taught the corporate world that you can't program a computer to run your business, until you knew how you were running your business. Amazingly, at that time, many small and medium sized businesses had no idea how they were operating.

Best Practices came about from the automation process, and from there we traveled along a superhighway of computerization/automation of everything in the process of business to a point where, again, we may need to stop and take a deep breath and relearn how we are running our corporate world.

The concept of Balanced Scorecard is that you can and should assess your corporate efforts from various viewpoints and achieve a ?balanced? state by dealing with those areas that are out of balance. The viewpoints represented include, but are not limited to: ownership; management, and; customers. The areas reported on are usually defined variously as Mission, Vision and Strategy, or as Results, Operations, and Capacity. There is no fixed rule as to how to slice the enterprise or how to name the various viewpoints. What is important to the system is that the reporting be done in each area of operations, (as you define them), and that the analysis, and implementation of corrective measures be implemented as required to start the sequence again.