Business Scorecard Annual Survey – 2012

Executive Summary

The biggest challenge facing companies and organisations of all sizes today is how to drive their businesses out of the current economic recession.  To do this focus has to be put on managing operational activities effectively and building and managing strategies for change.

In the past, strategic execution has not been a highly developed process for most companies and organisations.  Therefore it has been difficult to manage strategic change.  Although a business scorecard should not be seen as the ‘silver-bullet’ to enable strategic change it can, if implemented properly, make a real difference.

This survey was designed to examine business scorecard usage within companies and organisations to provide an insight into where and how they are used.  The respondents were told this was not a survey specific to balanced scorecard usage.  All scorecard types were considered valid.

The following key points can be gleaned from this survey:

• Scorecards are in use across all industries.  The format of the scorecards varies considerably and seems to grow through specific company/organisational need.
• There is an emerging use of dedicated technology to manage strategy, objectives and KPI scorecards.  However, the vast majority of scorecards are still spreadsheet based.
• There are still a small number of companies/organisations that manage their strategy, objectives and scorecards using free form documentation.
• The majority of scorecards are used to simply report on progress ‘up-the-chain’.  In other words they are a mechanism to ensure executive management is informed about the business.  Of this majority most would view scorecard management as a required task, but not one that held great importance.
• Although there were no specific questions about objective and metric ownership, discussions revealed that this was the single most important contributing factor to a laissez-faire attitude toward the scorecard process, i.e. lack of ownership.
• There was also, however, a large minority who believed that the scorecard process was an instrument for positive strategic change.
• Over a third of the companies surveyed believed that the way in which their companies were measured could be improved; only a very small proportion was highly satisfied.

The results of this survey provide encouragement to both executive management and practitioners alike.  Although there is still a majority view that things need to be measured just to monitor operations, there are areas such as the introduction of technology and scorecard use in strategic improvement that suggest more formal approaches have real value.

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