Not long ago, we discussed about the gap between strategy execution and alignment as well as ways to bridge the gap with the Balanced Scorecard. Technology plays an important role in facilitating strategic performance management. A scorecard-enabled solution must support a number of management processes. The critical processes outlined by the Cranfield School of Business (2003) are:

To effectively bridge the gap between strategy and execution, it is vital that companies address 4 areas: corporate goal clarification, process alignment, measuring and monitoring, integration and communication. The Balanced Scorecard, created by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, has emerged to be a powerful strategy management tool as it makes strategy become “everyone’s everyday job”.

In the last post, we outlined the alarming issue of a strategy gap in businesses nowadays and how it can be undesirably widened by failures in strategic planning and budgeting.  To gain a competitive advantage and increase business resilience, companies need to bridge this gap between strategy and execution, the task that requires serious dedication from everyone in an organisation. There are four factors of an effective strategy and execution alignment, from conveying what corporate goals really mean to identifying how they should be achieved.

It is hard enough to come up with an effective corporate strategy. It is even harder to execute that strategy effectively to achieve desirable outcomes. A 2009 study on employees found that 70% of them were confused about what they needed to do to support their company’s strategy. The same study, published in Fake Work by Brent D. Peterson & Gaylan Nielson, Simon Schuste, “half of all the work people did had nothing to do with their company’s strategy”. For the last dose of alarm, 73% of surveyed workers did not think their company’s goals are translated into specific executable work.

 Now that you have completed the initial stage of building a KPI template , it is time to evaluate their validity or ask the question “How well are they measuring performance?” You should also determine the methods of KPI reporting.

After considering how Key Performance Indicators link to corporate objectives, now we come to the process of writing down KPIs in a KPI template.

In the last post, we have touched on KPI definition and examples , now we will show you how to design a KPI template.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have emerged to be the most significant source of business performance information that helps guide businesses to the right track. However, many companies trip right on the first step, which is understanding what KPIs really are.

In the previous 2 entries, we discussed what Governance, Risk and Compliance means and how to effectively deploy a GRC plan. But how do you know you are on the right track and what GRC software tools are available to help you?

Just as students get their report cards, companies measure their performance to essentially know how they are doing in terms of where they are heading. Measuring business performance therefore usually involves identifying what to measure and collecting data, with the ultimate goals to: