Michael Carnell     

Get It Right, Get It Fast

Pilot Balanced ScoreCard helps execs set and monitor goals, but not on enough client platforms yet

It goes without saying that a business’s success largely depends on those who run it knowing where they are going, where they have been, and what they are trying to achieve. Getting that good a grasp on the business has always been problematic, however, because it’s difficult to get the right perspective quickly enough.

Information presented in a timely manner, it seems, is usually unintelligible. But information presented in a useful form is usually too old. It is a constant struggle, and one that companies specializing in decision-support software strive to alleviate. One such company is Pilot Software Inc. Its newest product, Pilot Balanced ScoreCard, is designed to provide managers with the quickly intelligible measures they need, through the balanced scorecard techniques of performance measurement that Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton advocate in The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 1996).

Essentially, the balanced scorecard methodology revolves around holistically monitoring multiple performance measures in an organization, instead of looking at perhaps just the traditional financial measurements. In much the same way that a balanced diet is made up of multiple food groups consumed in proportion with each other, so an organization must have a balanced view of the activities and influences affecting it. So, in addition to purely financial measures such as balance sheets and product shipments, you would examine measures such as employee retention, employee training, customer satisfaction, and product return rates.

All of these measures, although perhaps in differing areas, are related. If employee retention drops, then training costs will most likely increase and quality will suffer. Product returns will, in turn, rise and customer satisfaction will fall. As a result, product shipments and balance sheets will finally reflect trouble.

Perhaps if training were increased earlier, it might boost employee retention, thereby increasing quality and customer satisfaction and so on. The Pilot Balanced ScoreCard software attempts to take disparate information and display it in such a way that executives can view the whole picture quickly.

Freedoms and Restrictions

Balanced ScoreCard is really part of Pilot’s Decision Support Suite, so it’s not fair to view it in a vacuum. Even if you opt not to use the rest of the suite, you’ll have to use some kind of back end, and Balanced ScoreCard’s performance and usefulness are tied directly to that back end. ODBC facilitates database access for Balanced ScoreCard, as well as the other parts of Pilot’s suite, so back-end support should not be a problem. Although the sample database supplied with the product is in dBase, the standards of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, or any other can be used.

Pilot Balanced ScoreCard is PC based and runs under Windows 95, 98, or NT. It supports no other platforms, including the Web, at this time. In this age of intranets and Web-enabled applications, a Web-client omission seems a dangerous one. As for the client installation, it requires less than 100MB hard drive space, but you’re likely to install the product with other components of the Pilot suite, so make allowances for that. The server components are primarily part of that same suite, and so are not included in this review. The only server components required are the database repositories, which serve as the data sources for the product.

Installation is quick and easy, following the current style of most Windows program installations. However, it was during this phase that I discovered the only real problem with the product — although it appeared time and again. I evaluated a beta version of the software, and although you have to make allowances for betas, the one fault I found echoed my experience with Pilot throughout the years: The documentation’s caliber falls short of the product’s quality. My evaluation copy excluded a help file because it isn’t finished yet. But beyond that, steps in the instructions were wrong, buttons or menu items were mislabeled, and it provided very little, if any, explanation for certain actions it did in the tutorials. It leads you through the process, but without helping you understand the reasons behind the process, so learning it is time-consuming.

FIGURE 1 The Balanced ScoreCard overview window, from which you can see a snapshot view of all measures.


FIGURE 2 Trending analysis of one of the measures presented in the opening window.

How It’s Used

When you open Balanced ScoreCard, the first thing you see is the overview window. (See Figure 1.) This main screen presents a snapshot view of all measures, using gauges resembling those on a dashboard. Each gauge shows the performance of the current period vs. an established target based on exception criteria that the administrator defines. Just below the dial in the gauge is a small icon of either a circle or a triangle. This icon indicates whether the performance trend is up, down, or steady. The gauges may also contain a small, red arrow pointing to another measure to show causal relationships. The default gauge grouping uses the four categories the Kaplan and Norton methodology specifies, but you can customize these groupings.

Along the left-hand side of the opening screen are five tools for use with the measures. You access these tools by dragging and dropping the performance measure onto the tool. The first tool lets you add a comment to the measure. Dropping the measure onto the Comment tool opens a dialog box that lets anyone with proper security add date- and username-stamped comments to the measure. Because these comments are stored on the server, the information is shared among users. The Information tool simply provides a view of the detailed numbers behind the gauge and the metric’s definition.

The Trend tool (see Figure 2, page 58) graphs the appropriate measure, trended over time. You use this graph to determine whether change measures are an anomaly or a bona fide performance trend. The Deviations tool can also aid in this analysis. This tool presents a drilldown-enabled chart of the information contained in the high-level roll-up of deviation measurements. Although an overall measure may look favorable, by double clicking on an area to drill down a level, you might discover that favorable measures in one area mask problems in other areas. The Benchmark tool compares results for actual values across the various dimensions in the model. It helps you analyze problems the Deviation tool may have uncovered, to see if that deviation relates to measures in other parts of the organization.

Designing a new balanced scorecard is a simple process. After selecting a blank scorecard from the File menu, you then enter the design environment by selecting the Design item from the View menu. You then go to the Perspective Layouts item on the design menu to establish the scorecard’s layout. Finally, you set up each gauge to monitor a specific performance measure.

Bridging Data and Presentation

Here you encounter an issue I mentioned earlier. Pilot Balanced ScoreCard is a front-end tool for monitoring OLAP-style performance measurement data. By itself, it is an attractive tool that does nothing. The real work in deploying a tool such as this falls to the preparation of the back end. Balanced ScoreCard’s part in Pilot’s suite of decision-support tools is as an executive information system (EIS)-style view into dimensional data prepared on an OLAP server.

All decision-support tools have this problem, though. While new products such as Microsoft’s OLAP server are just beginning to gain acceptance, products from veterans in this arena, such as Cognos Inc. and SAS Institute Inc., have been around nearly a decade, and in some cases longer. However, a disjoint has always existed between the OLAP and multidimensional databases on the back end and the presentation layer in front. It is by viewing Pilot’s Decision Support Suite as a whole, that you’ll see each component’s utility and strength. This is where products such as Dashboard Anywhere from The Soft Bicycle Co. come up short. Although Dashboard Anywhere is a fine presentation of the balanced scorecard methodology, it does not have the rest of the suite to back it up.

As part of an overall EIS or DSS strategy, Pilot Balanced ScoreCard is a fine addition to the measurement presentation arsenal. And, as the balanced scorecard methodology continues to gain support, products like this will be needed to present the information to those who need it. The two issues that might hinder Pilot’s product are its documentation and lack of multiplatform or Web support, the latter becoming increasingly important as business centers decentralize.

Michael Carnellis a project manager and developer for client/server and intranet development at CareAlliance Health Services in Charleston, S.C. You can reach him by email at carnellm@palmettobug.com, or visit his home page at www.palmettobug.com/carnellm.