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The development team is putting the finishing touches on by far the largest iteration of the ESM6 build, measures. Pure agile gurus would have encouraged us to break this iteration up into 8 separate iterations given its size but because of our skilled developers, we were able to still pull off a long but very successful build! Unlimited data series, Excel based tables, in line data field calculations with compatible Excel fields, automatic target schedule setting, multiple measure charts per data set, data sourcing, and excel input/output for easy data management in ESM6 make this our biggest achievement yet.
Historically, ESM required final calculated numbers such as a target, actual, variance, and forecast. With ESM 6, if desired, those raw data calculations can be done right in ESM or easily sourced in from excel by the end user. We will also enable period groups for month to date, quarter to date and year to date summary series. This means you can track your total performance for a period in time without manual computations. Our measure charting enhancements should remove any restrictions users have felt in the past with complex measure calculations, roll up, and visual charting. We are very excited to get this out into beta testing later in 2012. Get ready!
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Imagine your strategic elements (themes, objectives, measures, driver measures, initiatives, initiative KPIs, and milestones) as an alignment “web” or “family tree” through which there are causal relationships. While some of these relationships are close, say 50-75% of their performance feed into the next element’s performance, others are distant, and perhaps say only have a 3-5% impact on another element from the same scorecard or from a cascaded scorecard. If there were only a way to represent that impact that would be wicked cool.
Now there is. The team has completed the build out of the ESM6 automatic performance status indicator setting iteration. If you want to in ESM6, you can activate this capability to have milestones and initiative KPI performance feed into the overall initiative performance. Initiative performance can then feed up into objective level performance. Similarly, driver measure and cascaded measure performance can feed up into strategic measures from both a performance status indicator level and at the raw data level. Strategic measures, cascaded objectives, and initiative performance indicators can then feed up into objectives and finally, objectives into themes. The ESM team is getting ready to automate your performance status indicators. Are you? We look forward to sharing this new capability with you soon.
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As we analyze our Execution Premium Community (XPC) site traffic from this past year we clearly see initiative management take the top spot. Strategy review meetings, leadership facilitation, measurement, and making strategy personal all sit as hot topics as well, but all came in half as popular as initiative management.
The team just finished the initiative management iteration for ESM6 and with its completion comes excellent capabilities in initiative criteria defining, ranking, and mapping. Through numeric weighting, ranking and scoring based off of how the initiative will impact the strategy, an organization will gain a solid grasp of which initiatives to select for their active portfolio. ESM6 initiative capabilities takes the user through the identification process, enabling you to brainstorm, propose, activate, pause, and complete initiatives in an easy to navigate interface. We look forward to sharing this new capability with you soon.
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ESM5.5, a minor point release is in final beta testing and available at http://beta.executivestrategymanager.com. We plan to go live with this release next week. More details on it are below. Feel free to use the beta site to do your work. It hits the same live production database meaning changes made there will reflect on the live ESM site and vice versa.
This is a seamless transition to end users as all the processes they follow today will be the same in ESM5.5. If initiative KPI management is of interest to your team, we should set up a call where I can show you around that area. The team is still hard at work with ESM6 and I’ll be exposing you to the that new version towards the end of the year.
Enhancements include:
· Dynamic page loading to speed up page load time
· Additional query enhancements beyond the work we did earlier this year to speed up the overall system
· Slight look and feel changes along with some minor functionality enhancements
· Fully flipped Arabic version available by user (go to your profile and select Arabic for your language option). Note, data entered by user remains in language originally entered.
· Initiative summary page listing of initiative KPI names and status indicators
· Initiative detail page listing of associated initiative KPIs with status indicators (KPIs can have unlimited data series).
· Cross browser compliance with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome
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Now that the Execution Premium book by Drs. Kaplan and Norton has been out in the market for a number of years, let's take a look at the benefits that can be realized through the XPP implementation in your organizaiton. Let's take it a couple stages at a time. Stage 1 and 2 looked at Develop the Strategy and Translate the Strategy. Now let's look at stages 3 and 4: Align the Organization With the Strategy and 5: Plan Operations. In these stages, the strategy has been clarified with scorecards and strategy maps at the enterprise level so now they need to be cascaded down into the business and support areas to ensure vertical alignment. Individuals might employ personal Balanced Scorecards and development plans to link the performance review process with the strategy. A communication program around the strategy is also paramount. The organization can begin to link strategy to key processes, driver models, and dashboards. Rolling forecasts and dynamic resource allocation are often found around the operational planning step.
STAGE 3: ALIGN THE ORGANIZATION WITH THE STRATEGY
- Defines the corporate role so that organizational units receive strategic guidance & direction
- Cascades strategy maps and scorecards to ensure organizational alignment to the strategy
- Leverages synergies between corporate, SBU, shared services, and other units to ensure alignment
- Communicates the strategy so that everyone understands his/her role in executing it
- Aligns team and individual goals and incentives to ensure the behavioral changes required for success
STAGE 4: PLAN OPERATIONS
- Identifies critical processes required to execute the strategy
- Establishes cross-functional business teams to drive performance across organizational boundaries
- Develops rolling forecasts and dynamic resource allocation to link strategy and operations
- Implements driver based planning to identify the critical levers of performance
- Creates operational dashboards that identify the key performance indicators that drive performance
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM Development Team,
ESM Features,
ESM General Information,
ESM Tips and Tricks,
Initiative Management,
Innovation,
Operational Reporting,
Personal Balanced Scorecard,
Reporting,
Risk Management,
Software as a Service,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
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Posted
9/7/11
@ 2:25 PM
by ESM Team ESM Team
Organizations, in each of their many dimensions, are fascinating to explore. One of my favorite subject matter experts, Gary Cokins, notes: “[J]ust like our grandmothers each had their own recipe for a holiday fruit cake, organizations are concocting their own customized versions of the performance management framework”.
Recently, I had the pleasure of taking a two-month reprise from Boston’s cold, wet, winter weather to go on assignment in sunny Australia.
The purpose of this trip was to provide technology and consulting support to a new ESM client, alongside a team of colleagues from our APAC region. It was my first trip to the country, and first direct exposure to several other client organizations in that corner of the world.
Each company I worked with had a unique set of ‘ingredients’, but sought the same outcome: success. Despite their specific differences, it’s quite remarkable to find time and time again that organizations across the globe, and in a wide variety of industries, tend to experience similar issues and seek common answers.
After learning more about how each of their programs were being operated, we discussed new ways to embrace and benefit from the software’s capability; helping each to apply its tools the method best suited for their unique situation.
Stay tuned for specific lessons in the next blog post.
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In this month’s edition of the Balanced Scorecard Report, Cassandra Frangos’s article, “How to Embed Innovation into Your Organizational Culture,” hit home. As a member of the Executive Strategy Manager (ESM) team, we are constantly challenging ourselves and each other to drive the innovation of our product. In this article author, Cassandra Frangos, Ed. D, Cisco Center for Collaborative Leadership, reveals that successful innovators “apply specific practices related to culture, talent management, and organizational structure – areas that lie within the foundation learning and growth perspective of the Balanced Scorecard and link to the customer and process perspectives.” In doing so, she provides concrete best practice objectives that can be applied to each of the above organizational areas.
I’d like to highlight a few that have been instrumental in ESM innovation:
Objective: Build a diverse team
Over the course of the last decade, ESM has evolved into a diverse team with members from various backgrounds and work experiences. While some members have been around since the inception of “First Report,” ESM’s grandfathered software; newer members of the team come with fresh perspective and ideas. Our differences have allowed us to challenge one another and to work in collaboration to consistently innovate ESM. As a result we have designed the market leader in strategy execution software.
But our journey in product innovation does not stop there, as we continue to develop ESM6 it is important to reflect on the following two objectives:
Objective: Celebrate learning
The article notes: successful innovators encourage risk taking and reward people for moving good ideas toward reality. As the Kaplan and Norton continue to provide new thinking around the Execution Premium Process, it becomes an area for growth and opportunity within ESM.
Objective: Foster connections with external stakeholders
It is absolutely imperative that we as ESM team members build and maintain healthy relationships with our clients. Our clients fuel the ideas that drive ESM innovation and ultimately the success of tool within organizations.
As Ms. Frangos states, “the goal of embedding innovation into your organizational culture is to get more products to market faster.” Likewise, the goal of the ESM team is to bring our clients the best strategy management system to market, faster. As we move forward in the development of ESM6 I invite all of you to reach out to your account manager with suggestions and enhancement ideas. You too, are a collaborative member of this ESM team.
To read the full BSR article in ESM, navigate to Resources > Libraries.
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The ESM team is hard at work innovating, designing and building ESM 6. This effort began in February 2010 and will continue through to Beta launch in early 2012. Through our recent surveys, direct client requests, and guidance from Drs. Kaplan and Norton and Palladium’s strategy consulting experts, we’ve compiled over 200 potential enhancements to include in this release.
As our developers share these new enhancements with the larger ESM team, we get more and more excited about where the ESM community is pushing the application. After all, it is you, the client, who’s advancing our application as you use it in your organization and provide us with feedback.
Some of the latest features to be built include automatic status indicator roll up across the scorecard. For example, milestone performance status indicator can impact the overall initiative status indicator, which in turn impacts objective performance status indicator. Objective status indicators can also automatically set based off of cascaded objectives and underlying measures. Measure can be automatically set by either data roll up or status color roll up. Objectives then roll up into perspectives and themes and then ultimately into an overall scorecard performance. It will be up to you if you activate this feature and just how far you want automatic status color setting to go in your organization.
We’ve also seen a new measure charting interface, allowing for unlimited data series, data calculations between columns, and multiple charts that can be displayed against the same measure data set. We will enable much more complex data roll up since different underlying measure series can feed into various higher level measures. For example, historically ESM required final calculated numbers such as a target, actual, variance, and forecast. With ESM 6, if desired, those raw data calculations can be done right in ESM or sourced in from data sources or data bases. We will also enable period groups for month to date, quarter to date and year to date summary series. Our measure charting enhancements should remove any restrictions users have felt in the past with complex measure calculations, roll up, and visual charting.
As we continue our development efforts we look forward to sharing our development efforts with you.
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I just came across an excellent account of the Balanced Scorecard effort undergone at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. In this paper, BSC champion and strategy director, Alasdair Macnab, along with Chris Carr and Falconer Michell from University of Edinburgh tell the implementation story. They focus their research on how the Balanced Scorecard approach can be successfully adopted for nonprofit businesses. The team also reviews why the Executive Strategy Manager was selected as the preferred solution and how it streamlined the data reporting and presentation while providing leadership and employees froma cross the organization critical line of sight into the strategy.
Key findings cited from the paper include:
Just as strategies are specific to an organisation, the balanced scorecard (BSC)/strategy map can and should be adapted to suit an individual organisation to leverage the full power of the BSC system.
• The effort and commitment required from senior management involved in transforming strategy management processes should not be underestimated as individuals/departments will become more accountable for their actions, particularly in the public sector, and resistance to change may be experienced as a consequence.
• If an effective costing system is developed, such as the one described in this report, management will see how their staff are directing their efforts, particularly important in knowledge based organisations.
• With their intimate knowledge of the organisation, the management accountant is well placed to become very involved or direct the transformation process to manage strategy execution leading to improved effectiveness/profitability of the organisation. In this way the management accountant becomes more of a strategic partner to the business.
• The research relates primarily to the practitioner who should find it helpful as the work is based on research subject to academic rigour but is translated into a pragmatic approach via the case study; thereby demonstrating its usefulness to a real organisation.
See:” Implementation of the balanced scorecard and an alternative costing system at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh,” available at the following link:
Access the full report here
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Balanced Scorecard,
BSC Hall of Fame,
Business Leadership,
Client Success,
Competitive Advantage,
Decision Making,
ESM Development Team,
ESM Features,
ESM General Information,
ESM Tips and Tricks,
Initiative Management,
Operational Reporting,
Reporting,
Risk Management,
Software as a Service,
Strategy Maps,
Sustainability
|
Posted
7/22/10
@ 11:43 AM
by ESM Team ESM Team
If you have yet to decide on a software application to help you manage your strategy, we've compiled over a hundred functionality requirements you should consider when evaluating solutions.
Technical and Administrative Requirements:
General Requirements
1. The software must be browser-accessible and work on the firm's Intranet as well as Internet
2. All of the firm's employees must be able to use the software without having to install software on each PC
3. The software must be fully integrated and use the same technological platform
4. The software must be based on recognized standards and open interfaces. The software must not contain any proprietary elements
5. The software must be ready-to-use standard software that is under further development and has a version number
6. The software must be delivered with complete user documentation that describes all the software's possibilities
7. The software should have a separate user-configurable presentation layer and a separate configurable data layer
8. The software should be able to interface with company databases and import data via SQL queries and tab- or comma-delimited file import or the like
9. The software should be able to handle other data than that which belongs to the scorecards
10. The software must be extremely user-friendly and intuitive in use. All parts of the user interface must be in English
11. The software must have flexibility in selecting presentation method
12. It must be possible to present data in tables, graphically or in reports presentation form for each critical measure
14. It must be possible to print out the chosen presentation or export it in PowerPoint and as a PDF
15. It must be possible to build reports and export them in an appropriate Microsoft Office format
16. The software must have intuitive navigation logic
17. It must be simple for the software to present figures for the current period and other defined periods, like year to date
18. The software must be able to store and display archived versions of the scorecards, strategy maps and data
19. The company should be able to configure, without third party assistance, menus and texts in the user interface to use our own terminology
20. It must be possible for the company to define its own help texts in the user interface
User Admin Requirements
21. The software must allow the client administrators to add and manage users
22. The software must allow the client administrators to set user permission levels
23. Each user must be authenticated individually before he/she is granted access to the software
24. User identity must be the key for gaining access to scorecards, critical measures (KPIs), drill- down, reports, strategic initiatives and comments
25. It must be possible to regulate what access each user needs to a data field (read, write, update or delete)
26. The software must have role-based access control, so that defined roles specify which access a user has
27. After an inactive period, the software must perform a new authentication before granting the user access to the software
28. The software must have functionality for logging activity in the software, including logging of user and time when data was changed or deleted
Administrator Requirements
29. Since management of the software will be spread among several people, it is a requirement that the administration tool (to set up and manage the software) be multi-user (simultaneously logged on)
30. It must be possible to grant different access rights to different administrators.
31. It must be possible for employees in the company's various operations to set up and manage the software
32. It must be possible to create a "scorecard template" that can easily be distributed or copied to each operation so that it is only necessary to create all the scorecard logic once
33. It must be easy for the administrator to cut and paste perspectives, strategic objectives and critical measures
34. It must be easy for the administrator to read, update and delete data from the software. It must be possible to limit access to this functionality
35. It must be easy to add, change and delete perspectives, strategic objectives and critical measures (KPIs)
36. The software must have tools for automatically configuring presentation in web format
37. It must be possible for the company to handle maintenance and upgrading to new versions of the software
38. The software must be able to track and report on all update activity by user, scorecard, and by date
39. The software must have the capability to assign shortcut access to specific users or via strategic elements
Functionality Requirements:
Strategy Map and Scorecard Entry
40. The software must conform to the Kaplan-Norton Balanced Scorecard Methodology. It must at least have the following structure: strategy map, scorecard, strategic perspective, strategic themes, strategic objectives, measures and initiatives
41. The software must have no limitations on the number of perspectives, themes, strategic objectives, measures or initiatives that can be used
42. The software must have customizable fields for the storage and reporting of data for each part of the scorecard (strategy map, scorecard, strategic perspective, strategic themes, strategic objectives, measures and initiatives)
43. The software should allow the import of images for use in strategy maps
44. The software should allow for customizable objects on the strategy map
45. The software should have an intuitive user interface for the creation and manipulation of strategy maps that mimics standard presentation software such as MS PowerPoint
46. The software must have functionality for showing strategy maps with cause and effect relationships between strategic objectives
47. The software must have customizable views of the strategy map, objectives, measures, initiatives, themes, performance summaries, alignment matrices and action items
48. The application must have the capability to build theme maps
49. The software must have the ability to have several scorecards for an organization or operation
50. The software must be able to present data for all levels in the organization
51. It must be possible to navigate from the main strategy map to strategy maps for other operations or to underlying data for individual strategic objectives
52. The software must allow for the creation of multi-level cascaded scorecards
53. Free navigation between the different levels in the organization must be possible
54. It must be possible to include an underlying level in the organization in several higher levels
55. The software must have the ability to link objectives, measures and initiatives across strategy maps at different levels of the organization and have the data update automatically
56. The software should provide for Alignment matrices to ensure alignment of objectives, measures and initiatives across scorecards
57. The software must have the ability to link 'child' objectives and measures to 'parent' objectives and measures
58. The software must display the status of each objective, measure and initiative using a 'traffic light' system with parameters that are customizable by the user
59. It should be possible to regulate color coded calculations by using formulas, e.g. 10% improvement over last year, when calculating color code (red, green, yellow)
Data Collection
60. It must be easy to build a presentation of key figures
61. The scorecard must support different time frequencies and periods. A scorecard must be able to contain key figures that are measured in time periods that deviate from the scorecard's reporting frequency
62. The software must have functionality to show trends. The software must have functionality for manual data collection
63. The software must have an alternative for automatic data collection from other data systems
64. The person who sets up a form for manual data collection must be able to specify who (persons and groups) is to answer the form, and notification must be given via e-mail
65. The person who sets up a form must be able to designate another as responsible for data collection (usually the one responsible for the corresponding key figures)
66. The software must be able to present underlying detail data for all key figures
67. The software must contain weighting of key figures in order to give weighted color coded results at all higher levels (strategic objectives and perspectives)
68. It must be simple for the person responsible for data collection to gain an overview over missing response
69. It must be possible to set up automatic reminders via e-mail on missing response
70. It must be possible to set up forms with fixed frequencies (i.e. monthly) for data collection
71. The software should have customizable views so a user can immediately find the data they are responsible for updating
72. When submitted data are registered, critical measure values must be updated automatically
Data Reporting
73. The software must include a reporting function with standard (pre-built, included) reports including overall status reports, theme-based status reports, data exception reports, measures status reports, initiative status reports and alignment matrices
74. The software must allow the creation of customizable reports for the export of data
75. It must be simple to find descriptions of individual critical measures with respect to measuring, responsible person, data source, frequency and measuring levels for red, yellow and green
76. It must be possible to show result attainment for strategic objectives in the strategy map using color codes (red, yellow and green)
77. The software must have functionality for presenting goal attainment for a critical measure by (minimum) presentation of data, goal attainment, tables and graphs
78. The software must have extensive functionality for graphical representation of results
79. The software must have functionality for presenting underlying data in "drill-down" reports
80. It must be possible for the tool to attach relevant reports or documents to each objective, measure and initiative
81. The application must have external link capabilities at the measure level
82. The software must have functionality for calculating and presenting key figures such as budget deviation, and user satisfaction
83. The software must have the ability to create and display multiple types of charts, consistent with basic Excel functionality
84. Reports must be dynamic so that it is possible to navigate from a report to the underlying data or key figures for further details
85. Managers and editors must be able to directly edit their charts and performance reviews from the graphical view of strategy map(s)
86. It must be possible to distribute reports to individuals or groups of employees, or make them accessible from scorecards, perspectives, strategic objectives or critical measures
87. As described above, all reports must be exportable to an appropriate Microsoft Office program and PDF
88. The application must have the ability to display theme maps and analysis views into the strategic theme (with supporting objectives, measures, initiatives)
89. The application must have the ability to show driver measures and manage basic calculations between driver and strategic measures
Initiative Management
90. A strategic initiative must at least contain activities and milestones
91. A strategic initiative must have functionality that allows it to be linked to the strategic objective it supports
92. A strategic initiative must have functionality that allows it to be linked to the theme it supports
93. It must be possible to assign responsibility for a strategic initiative or parts of one to specific persons
94. It must be possible to assign shared initiatives to the business units responsible
95. It must be possible to provide "view only" rights to specific initiatives across the organization
96. It must be possible to track progress against milestones, variance to budget and net benefits realized
97. The software must alert those who are involved in a strategic initiative concerning deadlines and updates via e-mail
98. It must be possible to link comments and documentation to a strategic initiative (e.g. project plans and documents)
99. It must be simple to export data from the software for further follow-up or analysis in other tools
Personal Scorecards
100. The software should allow for the entry of Personal Scorecards for all individuals within the organization
101. These scorecards should link personal objectives, measures and targets to organizational objectives
102. The field names and types in the personal scorecard should be customizable by the organization
103. The software should have a process and tutorial to assist employees in their creation of personal development plans
104. The software should allow for management oversight and approval of personal objectives
105. The software should store an audit trail for all changes
106. The personal scorecard software should allow for performance tracking
107. The software should allow users to set custom reminders with email notification
108. The personal scorecard software should allow for the weighting of objectives in calculating overall performance
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For nearly two years now the ESM team has leveraged Akamai's Edge platform to accelerate the speed of the ESM to your organization. I like to describe it as "turning country roads into private highways for the ESM."
While this Blog is more fitting for your IT team, if you experience latency when using the ESM, let's ensure your network is properly configured by passing on the following information to them. From time to time we find that organizations cache the IP address to our servers at their edge proxy or firewall. If this is the case, they will need to remove that relationship to avoid latency issues connecting to www.executivestrategymanager.com. Most of our organizations add a simple rule to avoid any proxy IP caching.
If your organization is still experiencing problems after the above is confirmed, please let your ESM account manager know and we will set up a network trace test through the Akamai support system to dive deeper into the issue.
The ESM team is committed to bringing you a lightening fast strategy management platform.
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ESM 5.0 is set to release to all ESM clients on April 27th, 2009. This version represents enhancements compiled from 10 years of end-user feedback, which has created our most user-friendly ESM ever. The latest version of the ESM also offers increased page layout functionality; including measures split screen as well as organization defined custom layouts. The demand for this enhancement came from our end users, who requested more flexibility around the display of measure charts.
We've enabled layouts where measures can be positioned side by side to keep them above the fold. We also have the ability to build custom "portlets" for users who wish to display a variety of strategic information on one page. For example, an organization might like to display an initiative detail grid on an objective detail page. These new data presentation capabilities facilitate a strategy review meeting the way you want. As this feature shows, the ESM team is constantly working with end-users to create the most user-friendly experience possible.
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The Executive Strategy Manager is pleased to announce the release of its beta version on March 16th, 2009. On this date we will begin a limited release of the latest version of our application to selected organizations. This time will allow for an initial review stage of the application, as well give time for training clients. At that time there will also be a webinar and feature overview released for all clients to preview the new version.
The beta version of 5.0 will be released to all other clients on April 27th. We will provide webinars to familiarize clients with new features, as well as offer live demos of the new version for interested clients. Please send us your name and email address at npeper@thepalladiumgroup.com if you would like to take part in this live webinar on Monday March 16th, otherwise the tape will be available to you for on-demand viewing. The transition to 5.0 will be a gradual process, and we will be sure to get each and every one of you up to speed before phasing out 4.5 in late June 2009.
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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
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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."
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The ESM team is working hard to make best practice guidance, advice, and training available to ESM users right in the ESM application.
We have received rave reviews about the BSC library that is embedded in the Meeting View section of the ESM and requests for more information just like it. You will be happy to know that a future release of our 20 course eLearning product is in the works. The product will have an integrated look and feel, common to our next generation of ESM products. Palladium's eLearning system helps you and your team develop strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards and then report on them as part of your ongoing strategy management. Our product is interactive and engaging with self-check questions, exercises and case examples. Stay tuned for the release of this product as part of the ESM.
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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.
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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.
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.
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I've recently returned from my 5th trip to a new client to help roll out a massive cascaded BSC project. As a billion-dollar entertainment empire, they've got stores, restaurants, hotels, and casinos. Being just your run-of-the-mill developer, I don't normally get first-hand experience with the way that BSC implementations are done, but I have to say, this one is quite fascinating.
How big of a project is this? Well, they have a separate scorecard for every store and restaurant, several for each hotel, and one for almost every type of game on their casino floors. All of these scorecards cascade up in the pyramid and ultimately dump into the corporate scorecard. That works out to 110 scorecards, with over 1300 objectives and more than 1500 measures.
Creating all the scorecards is quite a task, and I've been brought in to help facilitate the process by using the data sourcing capabilities of the 4.5 release. The data sourcing allows us to import data from an external source – in this case, Excel – directly into the ESM. This has been a necessity for setting up the 1500 measures for their scorecards. In addition, it also gives the client an easy way to update the information for their measures, by simply compiling and uploading an Excel sheet with the data once a month. There will be more information on this process to come.
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