A guide to balanced scorecard software and how organizations use it to track strategy. The video compares tools like Excel and ERP systems to dedicated software like ClearPoint, weighing the pros and cons of each approach.
If you're new to the balanced scorecard, you've realized there's a big process for setting up that scorecard for thinking through your strategy. But the next big step is bringing that strategy to life. And you don't want to spend more time managing your scorecard than managing your strategy. So look for good tools to help you make that strategy management process easy. One option is Excel and PowerPoint. Most staff know how to work Excel and PowerPoint. At the basic level. It's flexible for making custom changes, and you could do a lot of different things on the fly. But before you go there, think about the following. You're going to run into some version control problems with different people across your organization, sending you different Excel files with different names, maybe even sending you two or three as they make changes in their organization. The other challenge there is if you're really good and you can embed excel into PowerPoint, your PowerPoint file is going to get really big and you're going to have problems keeping that thing updated. Might even crash. As you evolve and become more mature, you're going to start looking at other tools. Speaking of other tools, you're going to be thinking about an ERP program. You've already bought them. They're built to handle massive amounts of data across your organization. They're great for data integrity. They're not necessarily going to be dedicated for a balanced scorecard. Also in a balanced scorecard, remember your perspectives. Financial, customer, internal learning and growth. The corollary systems you're going to have are financial systems and even HR systems. Do you have all of that built into your ERP system? Probably not. Some organizations have said, well, we'll just build it ourselves. You may not get something very robust. You may not be able to do automatic updates or automatic evaluations. And you want to keep this application evolving as your reporting needs evolve. So the real challenge there is you need to have that team that builds it for you and constantly available to tweak it and help you with your reporting over time. Let's talk about your other options, which is to buy a or subscribe to a dedicated balanced scorecard solution, something like clearpoint. It's built for doing the job you're trying to accomplish. It can handle goals, it can handle projects, it can handle measures, and it can link them all together for you. It allows multiple individuals to make updates simultaneously. It can send out automatic email reminders, and it can load data automatically so that your team will be all working together on the same page to get ready for those monthly or quarterly reports. You can customize it by adding custom fields. You can. You can make custom layouts. And the reports you get look exactly like what you design on the screen. So whether it's clearpoint or another scorecarding solution, you choose, you'll be able to get exactly what you need for the job.
