Balanced Scorecard is a unique approach for setting strategic goals and managing progress and monitoring achievements against projections. For the most part, companies implement scorecards with spreadsheets and other types of document formats that help them understand the relationships between the four foundational elements in the Balanced Sorecard model, financial, customers, internal, and growth/learning.

While balanced scorecard is an emerging tool and used by many large and small companies across the globe, there are plenty of other approaches to strategic planning that aren’t as rigid while some are very rigid and extremely formal. There’s not enough time in this article to explore even the most basic aspects of good strategic planning approaches. For today’s discussion, allow me to refer you to a simple strategic plan that was developed using the balanced scorecard approach. This page will give you the essence of the balanced scorecard approach and this is good enough to get a feel for how we might visualize strategic objectives.

One of the problems with any planning tool or approach that is managed through textual and numeric data, is understanding the relationship between actions on one element of the business and how any applied effort on that axis, impacts other dimensions of the plan. For example, a decrease in financial resources that were earmarked for a great sales person, will significantly impact the firms’ growth. Or, a new initiative to provide support for improved mobile sales productivity, may have a positive impact on revenue growth. Additional revenues make it possible to favorably impact customer support, and the trickle-down effect of this additional investment creates new internal benefits such as improved work facilities.

Spreadsheets typically provide the most vivid view of how changes impact a plan. But this perspective provides only numeric representations. A sheet of numbers will provide a quantitative view of your plans, but they often do not tell a story. Furthermore, what-if scenarios tend to demonstrate detailed impact at a very granular level, a viewpoint that often makes it difficult to get a high-level perspective that managers often need.

In very simplistic terms, a strategy map should be extremely clear; it should make relationships obvious.

Strategy Map Applications

As one might expect, there are numerous approaches and tools that provide assistance to business planners creating strategic maps for the balanced scorecard methodology as well as other systems. Desktop applications for strategic mapping is a relatively mature market. Unfortunately, this can’t be said for iPad; a few alternatives exist and early apps are improving rapidly.

One firm, Applied PC Systems Pty Ltd, provides Strategy Map solutions including a comprehensive approach to mapping relationships in a balanced scorecard plan. It’s not clear if this company plans to support iPad in the future, but my hunch is their web-based solutions will work well in mobile Safari.

Desktop applications are wonderful tools for managers who are typically in-office and rarely on the move. However, even people that have a history of being tied to a desk, are beginning to demonstrate mobile behaviors. The reason is self-evident; managers now have devices and pervasive connectivity that allow them to get closer to workers, field operations, and all manner of out-of-office experiences that make them better managers.

As evidenced by this comment, the definition of mobile worker is rapidly changing and driving the need for strategic plan awareness and participation, deeper into the organization.

“We can safely say that iPad changes everything about data visualization for mobile workers, and by “mobile worker”, I mean just about everyone in the organization. We can also agree that the definition of mobile worker has changed dramatically over the past ten years. Pretty much everyone in your organization is considered an always-on team player even when they’re having a coffee break. Whether it’s in the corporate cafeteria, or in a conference room half way around the world, we tend to depend more on people because they are simply more accessible. Because of this ten year progression toward pervasive mobile access to workers and the tendency to leverage mobile technology to get out of the office more, businesses have no choice but to embrace this trend by arming their workers with business information.”

iPad Changes the Strategic Planning Topology

There’s no doubt, iPad has fundamentally opened the door to new opportunities for managers to plan, monitor, and maintain strategic goals and targets for workers. Its agility and always-available window into operational data, make it an ideal strategic dashboard for monitoring and updating plans.

iPad is capable of capturing as much as it is able to readily display charts, data, and maps that visualize important operational relationships. Business intelligence is also an emerging aspect on iPad – many BI companies are racing to market with new apps and integration services that leverage the mobile fortitude and high resolution of the iPad screen, an ideal platform for communicating data in a visual manner.

But iPad also broadens the scope of strategic participants within the organization, and rightly so. The democratization of BI and strategic planning is sweeping through organizations, not so much because it’s an idea whose time has come, but because the mobile revolution has provided opportunities to see and interact with operational plans and data more easily and whenever and wherever it is contextually important.

Visualize Strategic Relationships

In most strategic plans, little effort is spent creating visual relationships because it requires additional effort. Strategic planning is one of those organizational tasks that never seems to be completed or up-to-date. Adding an additional level of mapping effort is typically not in the cards for most companies. But there are some tools that can help.

BsC for iPad

One of the things that I came to appreciate with BsC for iPad from Business Strategy Consultoria, is the simplicity that this app brings to mobile strategic planning. Version 1.2, which was recently released, includes a mapping feature. It’s rudimentary at best but it does provide the ability to create basic relationships between objectives defined within the four elements of a balanced scorecard.

As is evident from the user interface, the strategy map feature helps you define causation relationships between strategic objectives within the same scorecard elements or between objectives across the four scorecard elements.

While this feature provides essential mapping requirements, there are a few things that leave me in a fog and wanting more information.

1. When you create a relationship between two strategic objectives, it’s unclear whether the relationships are unidirectional or bidirectional. For example, the internal perspective (to have a recruitment model) is related to the learning and growth objective (to recruit the best talent). When making this assertion in the app, there’s no indication which is dependent on which/ Obviously, when you think about it, recruit the best talent does indeed depend on a viable recruitment model. It would be nice if this could be made obvious in the map.
2. There is no indication of how the maps’ configuration will impact the strategy positively or negatively. For example, when asserting a relationship between two objectives in related scorecard elements, it’s unclear how, if at all, the relationship will reshape the overall strategy. I’m not a balanced scorecard expert, but I must assume that mapping relationships nudges weighted values for the overall strategy.

While these points seem like they would be obvious benefits for improving the app, it’s important to point out that alternative apps for mapping strategic plans on iPad do not provide much relief.

The key takeaway for this app is it attempts to shape your maps in ways that make sense and are reasonable given the balanced scorecard approach to strategic planning. Indeed, BsC for iPad is ideal for organizations that want to simplify the entire strategic planning approach. This is particularly important if you’re trying to democratize strategic planning and participation to deeper part of your workforce.

Omnigraffle for iPad

Another tool I really like and use frequently on iPad is the very pricey Omnigraffle drawing and design app. While it comes with plenty of stencils for typical design and graphical tasks, it also supports the ability to import custom stencils and there is just such a stencil for creating visual representations of strategic plans using the balanced scorecard model.

This approach differs, of course, from BsC for iPad because you must understand the basic nature of the balanced scorecard method to build accurate visual representations and relationships. And you must also actually create the diagrams, although the stencil accelerates this process greatly.

But there are benefits as well; you have the latitude of shaping your visualizations for specific strategic communications objectives. Perhaps there’s a particular group in your organization that needs the plan simplified to help them understand the context of the strategic objectives. Or maybe there are proprietary ideas or product names that need to be concealed or shown as placeholders.

Another benefit is the ability to freely share strategy maps so that others can collaboratively work on updating and discussing the maps in project management software. Omnigraffle diagrams can be shared as PDFs, PNGs, or the native Omnigraffle format. This makes it possible to work with the maps in a collaborative cloud service such as DropBox, or Box.net.

Mind Mapping for iPad

I like mind maps a lot. They provide a great deal of freedom to deal with the nuances of every business challenge. However, agility in this sense is not necessarily an advantage if you use the balanced scorecard approach to strategic planning. It’s my experience, and the writings of expert balanced scorecard experts, that you really need a strong background in the scorecard philosophy to “freehand” strategy maps in a mind mapping tool.

This article, from the folks at MindJet, describes an approach for using mind maps as a strategic mapping solution for balanced scorecard.

As recommended by the designer of this mind map, for each perspective in the scorecard, there is a branch for a balance review. In this section (not visible in the above strategy map), you can define your objectives, measures, targets and initiatives and create a map that is also actionable as shown in the next diagram.

Infographics

There is a trend that is sweeping publishing in the technology and business segments. Infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. Also known as Information Visualization (InfoVis). And now the are mostly free tools that you can leverage to create strategy maps.

Keep It Simple

Whatever approach you have for strategic planning, consider adding a strategy mapping element because people like visuals and they respond well to visually stimulating data. But also consider an approach that is sustainable and easily maintained.