Viewing Category: ESM General Information
[
clear category selection]
(displaying entries
21 - 40)
Many organizations elect to refresh their scorecards with the start of a new year. Regardless of when you do it, there are some considerations you should take into account prior to beginning the process.
If you are still closing out a prior reporting period, such as Q4 2008 or December 2008, you should not refresh your scorecard for 2009 in this same account. Remember that the ESM captures your active/live strategy so if you delete old objectives and measures, that data is gone forever. A better approach is to reach out to your ESM account representative and request to have your scorecards cloned into new accounts so that we can name one 2008 and one 2009. This will then allow you to continue to edit your 2008 performance data and close out on those strategic elements while also freeing up your scorecard for the edits necessary to prepare for 2009. Be sure to lock down unused reporting periods and effectively communicate to end users which scorecard they should go into to accomplish closing out the year versus refreshing the strategy.
Organizations that are complete with their 2008 reporting do not need to create scorecard clones. The process is as simple as creating a scorecard archive through the client administration area prior to refreshing your strategy for the coming year. This archive snapshot will reflect all the strategic elements from that point in time and serve as a reference in the future should you ever wish to look back.
Finally, if you are not making significant changes to your strategy at this time, you can consider things business as usual. Add in the January 2009, Q1 2009, etc reporting period and continue reporting on your scorecard.
[hide extended entry]
Drs. Kaplan and Norton have focused their thoughts on strategy on the most pertinent topic in the American economy today, managing strategy in a downturn. In their most recent blog posting, Drs. Kaplan and Norton ask whether the Balanced Scorecard Concept could have helped some of today's failing industries, using the financial and auto sectors as examples. Can a Balanced Scorecard approach help industries be aware of and mitigate some of their risk?
Dr. Kaplan points out that companies generally lack adequate measures to quantify risk during unpredictable economic times. However, use of the BSC could help to broaden executives' views so they are not tied simply to short-term profits. Implementing the BSC with applications such as the Executive Strategy Manager helps companies maintain a larger strategic awareness of potential risks. The BSC also stimulates discussion in strategy meetings, allowing companies to aggregate the risk exposure onto their scorecard.
The BSC leads companies away from a short-term financial focus and towards a more encompassing strategic view. Use of applications such as the ESM facilitate a focus on strategy, an especially relevant concern during a downturn.
You can access the article and learn more by clicking here!
[hide extended entry]
The ESM team is pleased to officially announce the forthcoming ESM 5.0 Beta release in Q1 2009. Thank you to all the past and present clients over the past 8 years for your feedback on how to make the ESM as user friendly and effective as a meeting mangement solution as possible.
To read the full release, please click on the following link:
Read the 5.0 Press Release
[hide extended entry]
The ESM is the only application that has the core meeting view interface to present the right level of strategic information to leadership. At the end of the day effective strategic decision making is at the heart of what organizations are trying to achieve. In our new 5.0 release, we are really expanding on the features of Meeting View and making the entire application just as meeting friendly. Although the release dates have yet to be finalized, expect a beta version of ESM 5.0 late this year and the full release in early 2009. Find a partial list of the new 5.0 enhancements after the jump.
ESM 5.0 Feature Highlights
New User Interface - Meeting View is now the heart of the application, allowing for streamlined navigation and easier scorecard design and editing
Key word search - Quickly search for text throughout your scorecard(s) for quick updates
Enhanced PBR Charting Library - Select from a core set of PBR web charting measures for faster measure chart construction
Ownership Permissions - Multi select accountable users for ownership to action items and email reminders
Additional User Restrictions on Sensitive Strategic Information - Restrict user access by strategic element
New Copy Forward Capabilities - Copy forward data for one strategic element or for the entire scorecard reporting period
Improved Resources - Updated help area with reference guides, 20 eLearning courses (additional fee), community room, and best practice library browsing
8,000 line item objective/measure library - Our consultants have compiled the most inclusive library of best practice objectives and measures by industry and function
Other enhancements include:
Assign, view and sort actions items by strategic element (theme, objective, measure, initiative, milestone)
Addition of performance status indicators for action items
Ability to assign action items and driver measures to analysts and other user roles
Automatic email generation that is defined by client administrators
Additional custom report center fields
New layout options in Meeting View, including split measure report charts
Improved PDF report generation for a crisper export
LDAP support for local installs
Enhanced cross browser support
And more...
And don't forget, in addition to these enhancements, we've already taken huge steps in security and reliability in the past year. Late last year we launched our new highly-secure and super-reliable datacenter which keeps our application running well over 99.5% of the time. And earlier this summer we partnered with Akamai Technologies which delivers the ESM across the globe at blazing speeds. It makes one think maybe we should change our tagline to "Fast. Safe. Reliable."
[hide extended entry]
Palladium Announces XPA™--Execution Premium Assessment--based on the Kaplan-Norton Strategic Management System
New Tool and Book Based on Close Collaboration between Palladium, Kaplan, and Norton
Palladium Group Inc., the global market leader helping organizations execute their strategies, has announced the Execution Premium Assessment (XPA), the newest offering designed to help companies understand the strategic performance gap between where they are and where they want to be. XPA, the latest tool in an integrated suite from Palladium, is based on more than fifteen years of research by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the world's preeminent authorities on strategic performance management, and the best practices of more than 100 high performing organizations.
XPA is a two week process consisting of executive interviews, document reviews and a comprehensive survey that capture's an organization's view of its performance and issues through the lens of execution premium best practices. The survey uses a proprietary algorithm to show the cause and effect relationships between drivers of performance and performance results. In addition, XPA can show organizations how their performance compares to high performing companies globally, and where to focus improvement efforts to maximize near-term results. Insights from the process provide a shared framework integrating the diverse components of the management systems to help the organization clarify strategy, drive performance, and optimize data.
"Palladium's approach to assessment helped us to gain a better understanding of how to close our performance gaps," said John Smith, division senior vice president, Store Development, Collective Brands, Inc. "It enabled us to achieve measureable results."
"Palladium assessment tools provided us with an understanding of where we were and where we needed to be," said Sophie de Villers, vice president, Strategy Management, Canadian Blood Services. "The resulting roadmap put us on the path of translating our strategy into measureable results."
"Industry research and conversations with our clients reveals that execution is the number one challenge for CEOs. XPA will help our clients execute their strategies successfully, allocate resources efficiently, and improve decision making with insight based on data they can trust" says Dr. David B. Friend, Chairman and CEO of Palladium. "The Kaplan-Norton approach is a proven model that helps our clients achieve their own execution premiums."
The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business Press, August 2008) is the most recent in a series of books authored by. Kaplan, a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and Chairman of Professional Practice at Palladium, and Norton, Founder and Director of Palladium. The book profiles organizations that have achieved a true execution premium. The premium, evidenced by outcomes such as share price, revenue, profit, customer loyalty, employee engagement, or brand value, is achieved "by doing the right things right." The book describes a six-stage management system that shows organizations how to integrate strategic planning with operational execution. This system serves as the foundation for XPA.
Palladium collaborated closely with Kaplan and Norton in the development of the book through its various education, conference, and research programs. Most of the cases are Palladium clients, representing a variety of business models throughout the world and across multiple industries. The ideas in the book were tested and vetted by these and other organizations that have adopted the Kaplan-Norton approach to strategic performance management. Palladium practitioners contributed practical advice and implementation experience in the use of strategic themes for multiple strategy execution processes, initiative management, driver-based planning, rolling forecasts, and how to link strategy to operational process improvement.
About Palladium Group, Inc. Palladium Group helps its clients link strategy and operations to achieve an execution premium. Palladium's expertise in strategy, finance, and IT--delivered through consulting, education, training, and technology implementation services--help more than 500 clients clarify strategy, drive performance, and optimize data. Palladium has offices throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Palladium's Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy™ recognizes organizations that have achieved an outstanding execution premium.
For more information on how the ESM helps track your progress over time as reflected in the assessment, visit www.executivestrategymanager.com
[hide extended entry]
For those of you who receive Gartner research, you should give "Using Corporate Performance Management to Deliver the CEO's Strategic Vision" a quick read (30 April 2008, ID Number G00157458). The key take away point I found in the article is that operational management is a lot better managed than strategy management in organizations today. Most readers cannot argue with that point. In support of that hypothesis, I've found in my work that there is a greater level of comfort around the operations; it is thought of as more tangible, easier to understand, discuss, and report.
The joint Gartner/Cranfield research study showed that scorecarding is one of the least mature areas of management by organizations today. I agreed with the article's key finding and could relate to it in the organizations I've worked with over the past 9 years. There was one sticking point in the article and it happened to be part of the recommendation coming out of the study: CPM applications have the strategy management capability but that organizations just aren't taking advantage of it. I believe the reason why organizations aren't doing a better job with strategy management and why they aren't taking advantage of the strategy management capabilities within CPM applications is because they aren't that good.
CPM applications do an outstanding job at operational management which could include financial consolidations, budgeting, planning, forecasting, profitability modeling, and KPI dashboarding. I do not think they are good at strategy management, which often takes the form of Balanced Scorecards and objective based strategy maps.
A key criterion in an application that drives strategy management is one that helps facilitate a healthy strategy review process. This translates into being able to separate the strategy discussion and decision making process from the operations. While they need to be linked, they shouldn't be discussed in the same meeting. Leadership is lucky if they come together for a few hours each month to discuss strategy. Since strategy is complex, they need at least this amount of time to cover their strategy map and scorecard.
When leadership reviews strategy, they need to focus on the analysis behind the data, not the data itself. The strategy management application must allow for performance analysis, recommendations, implications, actions, etc. so that leadership can quickly review the analysis, make a decision and move on. There's no time for drilling into spreadsheets or operational data, except on an exception basis, so keep the strategic and operational information visually separated in the meeting interface. The strategy management application must allow for easy meeting facilitation between corporate and cascaded scorecards, display alignment views, allow for strategic objective, measure, and initiative detail pages, and capture meeting decisions. While CPM applications have made some headway in a few of these areas they still have a way to go before CEOs can be blamed for simply not applying the strategy management capabilities in CPM applications.
I believe that if the CPM application capability around strategy management improves we will see adoption rates rise. Although technology is only one of the three pillars (people and processes being the other two) that drive effective management, it is becoming an increasingly important pillar in today's rapidly changing environment.
The Executive Strategy Manager is the answer to effective strategy management. It can sit on top (via data sourcing and web services) of virtually any CPM application and provide the right facilitation in strategy review meetings. Palladium is not striving to make the ESM a CPM application as the application's strong suit is in strategy, not operational, management.
[hide extended entry]
I've been watching the first few days of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in awe of all the world records that are being broken. Just last night the US men's relay swim team "smashed" the previous world record by several seconds, in a sport where tenths of seconds are a long time. It's fitting that come August 2008 when the Olympics are in full swing, the Executive Strategy Manager is posting a record performance of its own.
The ESM presently has a record 136 active organizations from 6 out of the 7 continents of the world. We also have a record 6,000+ users building and managing over a thousand scorecards. Our number of concurrent users has never been higher nor has our speed of delivery to clients over those 6 continents. For more detail on our speed improvement using the Akamai Accelerator please see the below blog.
We have achieved these milestones through your support, and more importantly through your own commitment to achieving breakthrough results in your own strategy. It's awesome to see so many organizations realizing successful strategy management. Congratulations.
[hide extended entry]
Performance is big to us. We're constantly striving to enhance the performance of the application in any way that we can, because we know how frustrating it can be trying to use a slow website. That's why we were so excited to finally be perusing a partnership with Akamai to help deliver our application to the far reaches of the globe. Don't get me wrong, we've always had very good performance and very good global coverage, but there are a few spots around the world that saw excessive latency and delays that were out of our control.
As of July 26, our Akamai solution is turned on, and the ESM is on FIRE. We're seeing better than a 50% improvement on latency over the entire globe. Chronic trouble spots like Mexico, Middle East, and Australia are now seeing speeds similar to what we get here in our office - 20 miles away from our datacenter. I've attached the before-and-after performance results from our monitoring service and it's clear that we now have top-notch global presence. Feel free to take a look – it's astounding how uniform world-wide performance is now.
[hide extended entry]
The ESM has completed the much anticipated partnership with Akamai Technologies to provide a truly global acceleration of the ESM. Over the next few days we anticipate a 50 -80% or greater speed improvement of the ESM suite of tools, allowing us to reach our clients around the globe at record breaking speeds.
Everyone Benefits
Whether you are an Employee in our Lincoln, MA. USA office or a client halfway around the globe the ESM performance is now equally the same. Akamai route optimization and cache servers work 24x7X365 to identify the best route from your laptop to our ESM servers. There will be no more waiting for content to load as one navigates through Measures and Objectives in meeting view.
How it Works The ESM is now 100% globally-distributed using the Akamai EdgePlatform that continuously pulls and caches fresh content onto strategically positioned servers that are closer to our customers. A dynamic mapping system directs user requests for ESM content to an optimal Akamai edge server. Then, through route optimization Akamai identifies the fastest, most reliable path back to your data center to retrieve ESM content. Several connection techniques are in place to optimize communications between the Akamai edge server and the ESM infrastructure to deliver dynamic content to our clients over optimized connections that avoid Internet problem spots.
What to expect
- Much faster ESM performance worldwide.
- Capacity scaling on demand allowing the ESM to meet critical demand.
- Increased availability through uninterrupted service capability.
The quality of the ESM service will not diminish as the ESM continues to rapidly grow it's customer base. The Akamai EdgePlatform scales as the demand increases. That flexibility frees the ESM to allow you to truly execute on the strategy execution premium.
Stay tuned for future enhancements.
I was speaking with an ESM client manager yesterday and she mentioned to me that she just changed jobs. She had been an ESM manager (part of an Office of Strategy Management) in a different organization and leveraged her expertise on the application and best practice reporting methodology that the ESM supports to secure this new position.
She told a brilliant story around the market place premium for someone with Executive Strategy Manager experience. Knowing how to navigate in a piece of software unto itself does not make one qualified for a position, but I've found that most individuals who are comfortable with the application, are also comfortable with the processes required to successfully manage and report on strategy. The Executive Strategy Manager drives organizations into a healthy reporting approach by
- utilizing a proven meeting view interface during strategy review meetings,
- building out a hierarchical user structure to drive an inclusive reporting environment while communicating strategy at the same time,
- customizing views into the strategy at the individual, scorecard, and organization level to provide a clear picture of performance and alignment, and
- driving healthy project management with client administration features.
For all the ESM experts out there, consider updating your resume with these credentials. It might just be the deciding factor next time you're looking for a job! If you're not yet an ESM expert, be sure to replay past webinars, participate in future webinars, and reach out to your account representative to ensure your ESM is optimally configured for your reporting environment.
[hide extended entry]
The Executive Strategy Manager will soon be home to a completely refreshed list of objectives and measures from which our users will be able to sort by both perspective and industry (and sometimes function) to get a list of potentials for their own scorecard.
The Executive Strategy Manager was conceived by the inventors of the Balanced Scorecard and co-founders of Palladium and Balanced Scorecard Collaborative. Throughout it's 7 year history, we have worked with over a thousand organizations, many from the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame. From this experience, we have compiled what we believe to be one of the most complete objective and measure libraries available.
We encourage organizations to utilize the library to get good "template" examples of objectives and measures but adopt them to meet their own strategy. Time and time again, we have heard scorecard champions say that they could take their scorecard and hand it to their fiercest competitor and it will be of little value. What they mean is that it's all about "sweating" the process. When a team works together to formulate their strategy, they are transitioning all of their ideas into a single strategy (as depicted on a strategy map) rather than disparate strategies inside each leader's head. This is why we call the Balanced Scorecard approach a change management process.
Look for theses new objectives and measures in your ESM account very soon.
[hide extended entry]
After nearly 10 years in the strategy space certifying many of the big name business intelligence software vendors out there for their Balanced Scorecard module (meaning that their business performance management software meets the minimum standards for building and managing scorecards), I've formulated a concrete opinion on how most differ from the Executive Strategy Manager. I've seen cases where both types of applications are needed, neither is needed, and just one will meet the needs of the organization.
What the ESM is and is not
The Executive Strategy Manager is truly a strategy management platform. It should be thought of as a data presentation layer by which leadership and employees alike can review strategic performance and make informed decisions on how to proceed. It provides powerful alignment around objectives, measures and initiatives within a cascaded scorecard environment, breaks up the strategy map into digestible "theme" slices for simplified reporting meetings, and personal views into the strategic elements most important to individuals and teams. The ESM is not an application for sophisticated forecasting and trend scenarios, detailed analytics, or for managing hundreds or thousands of operational measures. Remember, it is a strategic management platform and tries to present the strategic level of information in an organization for informative decision making. It is not trying to manage all the data consolidations that some organizations demand.
The strengths and weaknesses of the BPM component within CPM applications
Most BPM solutions have a solid capability to handle thousands of measures that may or may not be organized in any logical fashion within an organization. They can consolidate them according to the rules established by the user, run analysis reports, trends, and forecasts. While they can display strategy maps and scorecards, they do not have the data presentation layer that is found to be so powerful by ESM clients worldwide. This presentation layer is precisely what creates the right dialogue within strategy review meetings and keeps the discussion at the strategic level.
So what solution is right for your organization?
My recommendation on what is the right solution for you is based off the sophistication of your organization's data needs, reporting culture, and the leadership team level buy in for managing their strategy with strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards. Larger data intensive organizations with a "bought in" leadership team require both the ESM strategy presentation layer AND a BPM/CPM solution to truly manage both their strategic and operational data (Yes the two integrate with one another nicely.). Less data intensive organizations often find they are successful with simply the ESM for managing their strategy as few measures below the strategic level are actively managed. Less data intensive organizations are also typically, but not always, smaller organizations and quickly find themselves priced out of the BPM/CPM space. And finally, I find myself turning away organizations who are looking for a measures database tool. I encourage them to seek out a good BPM/CPM solution set for their metrics management.
Need more guidance?
Please reach out to me at ksmack@thepalladiumgroup.com and I'll be happy to provide you with a frank and honest opinion on if the ESM is the right application for your organization.
[hide extended entry]
We are looking at another successful day at the CMA conference in blistery cold Toronto. I fielded some interesting questions around the ESM capabilities, especially when it came to forecasting and hypothetical scenario planning.
Considering I was speaking to a room full of CMAs, I wasn't surprised by the question. However, it's difficult to respond to questions like this, especially when only 5% of the room is holding any type of strategy review meetings to begin with(based off an informal survey I conducted earlier in the day).
The folks asking this question, like many folks who are just getting introduced to strategy management, often have a naïve sense for how easily they will be able to manage their strategy and forecast against it. They will quickly realize that it is one of the hardest processes to do well. The way I answered the question was very straight forward. The ESM application is not constructed for forecasting (beyond entering a simple data projection number). You can't run various scenarios and environmental factors against your strategy. We are not in the business to provide this type of support. Little do the individuals know that it is hard enough to report on your existing strategy, let alone run various strategic forecasts against hypothetical situations.
For now, the ESM team is leaving this functionality to the various analytical and initiative management tools in the marketplace. We have found that if you are going to do this type of forecasting, it's best to do it at the initiative level. This process can help leadership teams during the initiative rationalization process and gain insight into how various initiatives could drive their strategy. Beyond that, we rarely see scenario analysis run against a strategy map and scorecard.
[hide extended entry]
We are having a great session today with over 50 delegates attending the "Strategy Execution with the Executive Strategy Manager" workshop. When you put a bunch of Certified Management Accountants together, you get a lively dialouge from individuals who tend to be key figures in organizations.
This morning's session was spent on the foundation principles of the Strategy Focused Organization, how Balanced Scorecards and Stratey Maps are constructed, and the key elements of success.
This afternoon, we will look at a strategy management meeting simulation and discuss the key elements of a successful strategy review. These elements are grouped under having the right people at the table (this includes buy in and support for the process), a repeatable process that allows this team to accurately review the strategy as refelected on a Balanced Scorecard, and finally, the technology to support the organization in both gathering the right data and presenting it in a manner such that strategic decisions can be made.
More updates to come from a blistery cold and snowy Toronto, Canada.
[hide extended entry]
This week has not been a good one for traveling. I had to go to Charleston and Boston, and one flight was delayed 2 hours and the other for 5 hours. Further, I'm not even 1/2 way through this trip. It is the end of the year, so I needed to update our Scorecard. I was glad that I could access the ESM from anywhere.
With a secure web-based interface, I could travel and meet with clients and internal staff when I needed to, and still get secure access to our scorecard. Updating the ESM is a breeze, no matter where you are. This was especially good in the Charleston airport because the internet connection was really slow. One click updating really made the process simple (since each mouse click took about 30 seconds to load a page). I don't know how people survived the slow internet speeds of the 1990s.
I also had the opportunity to read about the new CISCO and Microsoft unified communications systems in Fortune Magazine. http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/magazines/fortune/cisco_strength.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007103111 Maybe this will help reduce the need to travel. Wouldn't that be nice?
[hide extended entry]
We run into this problem all the time. Organizations, albeit mostly government, want to manage their strategy in the Executive Strategy Manager (ESM), yet they often forget to think about the steps to truly make this happen. The steps aren't complicated, but they need to be considered before commitment is made.
The ESM is typically delivered as an "application service provider" ASP, meaning that most organizations sign up for the ESM and a few hours later, they are off and running in the application. There is no need for IT support; there is no hardware or software installation. The only conditions are that you need a modern computer, a decent internet connection, MS Internet Explorer, and Adobe Flash. These are on probably 95-98% of computers today when they leave the manufacturer.
While some governments are comfortable using an ASP, some organizations simply cannot due to classified information. This is when we turn to a local installation and offer to physically install the software on their own hardware. If you are considering a local installation, be sure to think through the fact that you need a dedicated server, and will need to manage your own back ups (this is typically incorporated into regularly occurring backups in the organization). The ESM team continues to support the software, but the code actually resides behind the client's firewall, be it in a top secret, classified, or standard environment. Our team has the appropriate clearances to handle these environments.
Reach out to us at esm@thepalladiumgroup.com for more information on the ASP and local installations.
[hide extended entry]
Tuesday was a day for Clinics at the Summit here in San Francisco. Palladium hosted 8 clinics: four in the morning and four in the afternoon. About 30% of the delegates to the Summit came early for the clinics.
At the clinics, delegates have a chance to learn about a specific topic by an expert from Palladium. These are small group sessions that have been rated very highly by attendees.
We also presented the World Class Strategy Meeting simulation, which was attended by about 80 delegates. People were very engaged in the discussion and many wanted to show the simulation to their leadership teams to get them to focus on what a review meeting really should be like.
The simulation highlighted the ESM and other data management applications and put them in context for the role they should play in your organization.
[hide extended entry]
Curt Schilling came to the Red Sox after the 2003 World Series. The Red Sox of course were not in the World Series in 2003, but they hoped that Schilling could bring the title to Boston. Curt brought an extra twist to the contract negotiation.
In order to be sure that he was completely aligned with the owner's goals, he negotiated a $2 million bonus if the Red Sox won the World Series. The management agreed, and the next year, Schilling got his bonus, and management broke the curse of the Bambino. Both parties must have been elated.
Schilling that year pitched with a broken body (remember the bloody sock). He did everything he could to help the team. Wouldn't it be great if you could get your employees so aligned to your company's strategy that they gave such an effort?
The worst thing you can imagine is when companies do have employees that give it their all, but their efforts are not aligned to the company strategy. Thus it is all for not. Organizations have an obligation to implement the BSC and to align compensation to the strategy. With these components aligned (strategy and compensation), breakthrough results can be achieved. Using the ESM and the Personal BSC, it can be done quickly and easily.
Now the Sox have a second world title under their belt, and Schilling is 11-2 in the post season. He is also up for contract negotiations this off season. I guess we will find out whether the Sox are willing to put their money where the strategy is.
[hide extended entry]
Have you seen the new logo for the Executive Strategy Manager (ESM)? I think it is pretty nice. I'm not sure that having a new logo is an indicator of success or not, but since the ESM has been around for over 7 years, it was time to differentiate the software from the company itself.
As you know, Balanced Scorecards are managed with indicators of performance, and we wanted to include these in our logo. Of course you can see the Red, Amber, Green codes, but did you know that many organizations also have blue as a fourth color, meaning that data is not available. This works for measures, but we would encourage you to report on your objectives even if you do not have the data yet for your underlying measure.
We also chose fonts and styles that matched the Palladium corporate style guide. We needed to be sure that the ESM logo had the same pretige and reputation that Palladium carries with its brand.
Finally, we chose the tag line "Design. Report. Execute." to talk about the importance of the application itself. It has all of the coaching and methodology in it to help you design yoru scorecard. The application was built to help managers report using the BSC framework. And we wanted our clients and prospects to always remember that their focus should be about executing strategy. Managing the scorecard should take up only a little time, because the majority of a leadership team's time should be spent discussing and executing on the strategy itself. Please tell us what you think about the new logo.
[hide extended entry]
As we reflect on the key stages that make the Executive Strategy Manager the strategy management platform it is today, we must honor the tremendous effort by both Drs. Kaplan and Norton and the hundreds of clients who advance its capabilities every day.
Drs. Kaplan and Norton quickly realized that organizations benefited greatly from the consistent and rapid approach driven through the Design Center Express (DCE) but really needed a support tool for the ongoing reporting of their strategy. Balanced Scorecard Collaborative began prototyping MS PowerPoint based reports, complete with an interactive strategy map and objective, measure, and initiative performance analysis pages. This solution was successful for a number of years and became the next step following the design of a scorecard in the DCE. We called it "First Report".
Clients appreciated the new reporting application yet quickly outgrew it as their scorecard program evolved. The First Report could not interact between cascaded scorecards and it couldn't be updated by more than one individual at a time. The Media and Applications team at Balanced Scorecard Collaborative pushed the Design Center (Express was dropped from the name at this time) application forward by incorporating the First Report directly into the software. Thus, the first version of a strategy reporting solution was born.
The Design Center and First Report co-existed for a number of years before the entire application was branded as the Executive Strategy Manager, the First Report renamed to the Report Center, and Meeting View was conceived. Meeting View became the core of the application where organizations could not only report on their strategy but also utilize a quick update interface to rapidly edit any component of the strategy.
This brings to present day, where the Executive Strategy Manager 4.5 version truly is the most advanced strategy management platform of its kind. The application has integration features such as data sourcing of measures and web services to push and pull content to and from the ESM and other databases, BI/ERP applications (Cognos, Hyperion, SAP, etc.), and custom software.
We thank Drs. Kaplan and Norton for their tremendous foresight, the hundreds of organizations past and present who have advanced the application through their practical use, and the Media and Applications software design and deployment team within Palladium.
Look for the ESM 5.0 Beta release in early 2008. If you are a present client, now is the time to get your functional enhancement requests in to your account representative. If you are not a client, contact us at esm@palladiumes.com today to become one.
[hide extended entry]
