Balanced Scorecard is a strategic management and measurement process championed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton in their book, The Balanced Scorecard. A variety of software providers have rushed to automate the process of creating, maintaining, and reporting scorecard results. The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Inc., which certifies Balanced Scorecard providers, lists CorVu Corp. among its 15 certified vendors.

Founded in 1993 as a developer of business intelligence (BI) products, CorVu shipped version 1.0 of its Balanced Scorecard product, RapidScorecard, in early 2001. With the most recent release, version 2.1, CorVu enhanced a number of features that make it easier to set up large scorecards and integrate the product within existing corporate infrastructures.

RapidScorecard isn't a BI tool. As its name suggests, its job is to give you a quick score on how the business is doing (similar to a school report card). After a company or business unit has decided upon a set of strategic objectives, it can use RapidScorecard to articulate, communicate, and measure those objectives. In addition to financial objectives, you can also incorporate the effects on company profitability of less tangible objectives, such as usability, business process, or customer relationship. While a BI tool is typically used to create and calculate measures that can perform periodic summarizations of operational data, RapidScorecard can weigh and connect these measures to provide insight into how well each strategic objective is being accomplished. The organized use of measurement as the language of expressing strategic objectives helps translate often-fuzzy goals into clear goals that are actionable, helping to align the understanding and actions at each level of the business hierarchy with the strategic objective.

Installation Independence

RapidScorecard was easy to set up without IT support. It runs as a pair of cooperating software components, a client-side Java applet, and a server-side Java servlet that manages connections to the RapidScorecard database. You will need a dedicated server (perhaps provided by IT). CorVu documents the installation with the Apache Tomcat server, and the company indicates that it hasn't tested the product with any other servlet engine. Insofar as Tomcat is the reference implementation for Java servlets, RapidScorecard should work with any conforming servlet engine. CorVu also provides an efficient installation program that installs Tomcat, creates all the required directories, updates the configuration files, and puts all the executable and descriptor files in the right places.

RapidScorecard presents a tree view of an organization's scorecard hierarchy. (See Figure 1.) At the root is the company node. For a given company, you can create unlimited business unit nodes. For each business unit, you can define multiple scorecards. We urge caution in creating multiple balanced scorecards for a particular business unit because the purpose of a scorecard is to provide a single integrated model of the unit's strategy. However, you might use this functionality to create a second level of organizational hierarchy within your business units; for example, if you wanted to create scorecards for various business units within a division.

Once you've created the organizational framework for your scorecard, you can start to set up each scorecard's components. A scorecard contains objectives and measurements associated with several business perspectives, which can be thought of as business domains within which you can perform a complete functional analysis. While the canonical version of a Norton/Kaplan Balanced Scorecard specifies four "perspectives" (financial, customer, operations, and internal growth), RapidScorecard provides the flexibility to define additional perspectives specific to your business requirements.

Within each perspective you can set up business objectives and organize them into groups, and then establish one or more measures, or business metrics, for each of your objectives. For each measure you establish, you must specify comparative standards, input source, and role. It would be friendlier to let the individual setting up the scorecard supply critical values during the first cut, and come back to provide the comparative standards of interest at a later time. RapidScorecard supports manual entry of metric values, definition of calculations to derive metric values, importing values from external files, and importing values based on a key that links the metric to a value in another application or analysis tool. (See Figure 2.)

Mixed Results

Once measure values have been entered or imported, RapidScorecard generates a score for each objective by normalizing the scores for each of an objective's measures on a scale of 0-10 and calculating a weighted average of the objective's measures, based on the weightings you assigned when defining the measure. However, it will not warn you when the sum of the weights doesn't equal 100.