Исследование Gartner Group & Harvard Business School: Balanced Scorecard Software Report (in English)

Bernard Marr and Andy Neely, the authors of the Gartner report 'Weighing the Options - Balanced Scorecard Software', have written a new report that scrutinises the current Balanced Scorecard application market.

The aim of this book is to help organizations through the software selection maze. The book has been designed to guide organizations through the process of selecting the right software solution for their organization, by offering a decision framework, as well as detailed evaluations of all of the major BSC software products available today.

"In this impressive monograph, Bernard Marr and Andy Neely, Cranfield School of Management, provide an excellent and comprehensive taxonomy of the issues that users should address when choosing among qualified software vendors. The Marr-Neely publication is an invaluable reference guide for organizations as they deploy BSC software to become strategy-focused organizations."

"The Cranfield report is a must-read for anyone evaluating Balanced Scorecard applications. It provides an invaluable framework for choosing an application, and this alone makes it worth the price tag"

Today, many organizations around the world are implementing the Balanced Scorecard or similar performance management approaches. Businesses as well as government and not-for-profit organizations realize the need to manage their performance. A critical aspect of any successful implementation is the use of the 'right' software tool. Software applications are instrumental in collecting & data, analyzing performance data and communicating performance information.

Software enables organizations to implement the BSC organization-wide with a single goal - that employees will use it. Therefore it is important to pick a solution that meets the requirements of the organization in order to ensure the usage and subsequent success of a BSC implementation. The problem managers face today is that there are over 30 application providers to choose from, each of them claiming that their solution offers unique and important features. Selecting the wrong solution can undermine the entire BSC development effort and the credibility of the performance management system.

The original Balanced Scorecard (BSC), first introduced as an improved measurement framework by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, in the early 1990's is proving to be enduringly popular. Research suggests that 60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies have experimented with the BSC and data from the Gartner Group suggest that over 50% of large US firms had adopted the BSC by the end of 2000. Data collected by the BSC Collaborative suggest that of the firms not currently using the Balanced Scorecard, 43% are planning to use one soon and a further 48% are considering using one.

Over the last decade the scorecard idea has evolved and its proponents argue that it is far more than a measurement framework, for it provides a novel means of translating strategy into action by ensuring that the behaviours of employees at all levels of an organisation are aligned with strategy. One of the implications of this, however, is that the BSC has to be implemented organisation-wide and used by employees if the laudable aims of goal congruence and strategic focus are to be achieved.

The Balanced Scorecard software marketplace has become crowded, and with over 30 different vendors it has become an extremely difficult and time-consuming exercise for companies to choose the solution that is right for them. The detailed report by Cranfield School of Management in collaboration with Gartner addresses exactly this issue by offering in-depth analysis of the following software products:

Software vendors with solutions to support a BSC implementation:

"I am very pleased that organizations now have convenient access to the results of Marr and Neely's extensive classification and testing of Balanced Scorecard software."

Professor Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School

"This 'field-guide' is of equal value to business users and IT professionals charged with BSC software implementation (who may be on unfamiliar turf), offering a thorough overview of the Balanced Scorecard and the history of performance measurement. Using [the report], readers can construct their own matrix and weighting to create a vendor short list. "

Dylan Mijake Director, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative