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March 28, 2002

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Balanced Performance

Setup and integration improvements outpace other needed refinements

By Jack Hakim and Tom Spitzer

Continued from Page 1

It uses a similar method to calculate a score for each perspective, although it appears to weight each objective equally without allowing the user to supply weights for the objectives. Going up the hierarchy, it also calculates an overall score for the entire scorecard, again on a 0-10 scale.

RapidScorecard displays scorecard scores, perspective scores, objective scores, and empirical measure values separately in a relatively customizable chart format. The charts use a charting control that allows the user to choose which statistics (such as best, worst, or planned) to display and whether to use a line or column graph to display selected items. Users can also select the range of periods that the charts will display and the chart colors. In addition to a chart, RapidScorecard provides a tactical scorecard pane that displays a parent and its children in boxes, with each component's score displayed in the box.

Visualization of results is an area where we think RapidScorecard needs more work. For instance, although the tactical scorecard pane lets you view constituent component values, it would be helpful if charts displayed at summary levels (such as those depicting performance on the overall scorecard, a perspective, or an objective) provided even minimal drill-down into the contribution of each of the constituents. We did find that by connecting directly to the RapidScorecard database, we could create additional reports that we desired.

Needs Refinement

With RapidScorecard, CorVu offers an easy way for companies that want to adopt balanced scorecards to get started. Installing the product and setting up the scorecard is straightforward. Where the product could use more refinement is in ongoing usability, cleaner workflows, integration with existing corporate infrastructure and applications, and, as we mentioned earlier, information visualization. Usability issues surface when entering measure values and navigating scorecard components using the shortcut bar.

The categories for this rating chart are defined at www.intelligententerprise.com/ reviewmetrics.jhtml.

There are two difficulties with integration in RapidScorecard. The first is the requirement to set up a totally self-contained user and privilege model that doesn't integrate with the corporate directory. The second is the interactive, batch nature of updating measures from external applications. To update the measures, you have to create text files in a comma-separated format, which CorVu specifies in the product documentation, then copy those files into a specified directory on the RapidScorecard server and manually perform an import.

These integration concerns are mitigated by the fact that most scorecards don't have large numbers of users or measures, so working around them shouldn't be too burdensome. Additionally, CorVu's tech support was extremely thoughtful and responsive when it came to helping resolve usage and conceptual questions.

Our balanced opinion is that if you're looking for a balanced scorecard product, you should consider this one. CorVu has delivered frequent updates to the product and asserts that the frequent delivery schedule will be maintained through the foreseeable future, so we expect the product to become increasingly robust and feature rich as its user community expands.

Jack Hakim [jhakim@ecwise.com] and Tom Spitzer [tspitzer@ecwise.com] are principals at EC Wise Inc. With offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, the firm specializes in creating user interfaces for analytical and other information systems that involve large, complex databases.