Critical Success Factors for Organisational Alignment

The most frustrating thing a manager may experience in his job is the effect of misalignment between those things that he or she is responsible for: performance management, operations, business strategy, and customer requirements. To solve this problem, one needs to have certain capabilities in place – unfortunately a huge, diverse set of skills, experience and knowledge.

WHAT ARE THEY ?
a) The balanced scorecard creation is more an art than a science. The capability to do this requires excellent facilitation, deep systems understanding, and wide organisational insight.

b) The Balanced Scorecard‘s Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are driven by the Value Chain of the organisation. To define a Value Chain requires highly skilled Business Architecture capabilities in order to conceptualise a practical usable business model.

c) Creating Balanced Scorecard Dashboards is not about the mechanics of extraction (E), transformation (T), or loading (L) of data. It is about the ability to define the data cube from which various dashboards at different levels can be driven. Skilled engineering and data analysis provides the breakthrough on this.

d) A static Balanced Scorecard doesn’t carry a great benefit if it only provides reactive information. Creating a flight simulation of the scorecard allows management to test their strategies in a dynamic manner. To do this, one needs the capability of systems thinking,

systems dynamics, business architecture and mathematical modelling to make it work!

e) Delivering the Balanced Scorecard through Business Intelligence is not about the ability

to create IT systems – it lies in the art and science of collection, simplification and visualisation of data and information.

“Alignment is one of the most powerful mechanisms to balance man, machine and money in the organisation. This is why I suggest that in order to optimise the business, one should look at the “design” of your business. And in this “design”; look at the alignment of all your organisational components! “