Here you will find a print-friendly template of a strategy map. Use it to brainstorm new strategic ideas for your organization.

I like the way BSC Designer software deals with strategy maps, but sometimes for the brainstorming sessions it is worth using pen and paper. We do this on some of our live events, and I’d like to share with you a strategy map template that we use.

Download PDF | View in BSC Designer Online

Each of the templates is available in PDF format so that you can download and print it. It is also available as a BSC Designer Online scorecard, so that you can open it, modify it according to your needs and save it to your own account.

Download template

Some getting started instructions

A strategy map template includes four perspectives. The rectangles inside of the perspectives represent business goals.

A business goal includes several lines to fill in:

• Use the first line to formulate the name of the goal
• Use the two lines with “clipboard” icon to write down some initiatives, and some relevant budget or timing information.
• Use the first “KPI” line to write down leading KPIs for this business goal
• Use the second “KPI” line to write down lagging KPIs for the business goal

You can read more about strategy maps and the way to design them in this article.

Once you sorted out the ideas about your strategy, go ahead and automate goals, initiatives, and KPIs with BSC Designer tool.

Online wizard will help even inexperienced users to create a professional strategy map with business goals, KPIs, and initiatives.

Answer simple questions – build a professional strategy map in 6 minutes.

Designing a good strategy scorecard is a challenge

Strategy or Balanced Scorecard is a popular tool for strategy description and execution. Organizations all over the world use this framework to formulate their strategic hypothesis, present it in a visually appealing way, and communicate to the stakeholders.

Is It hard to create a good strategy scorecard? What skills should one have? Well, there are some good books on the topics, some training, and off course there are some consultants that can help with technical part and guide your team.

Automating scorecard design with Strategy Scorecard wizard help

Why not allow software to guide you through the process? A Strategy Map Wizard 2.0 does this job. It asks you several questions about the goals of your organization, ways to track them, and initiatives that you have in mind and presents all the obtained information on a strategy map.

• The best thing is that it is free!

Anyone can use this link and start building their new strategy scorecard right now.

How the results look like

Here is what the Strategy Scorecard Wizard can create for you.

A business goals structure presented in the 4 perspectives.

It will also align information about initiatives and action plans with your goals and KPIs.

A structure of the KPIs presented in the four perspectives.

A strategy map with business goals, KPIs, and initiatives.

How the results can be used

In the end of the process the software will create a free trial account for you. You can use it for 30-days for free (no credit card is asked) and play with your scorecard/KPIs.

• If you like the tool you can continue using it on a paid basis.
• If not, you can simply export your strategy map to a picture file, and export your KPIs to Excel.

It’s absolutely free, no strings attached!

It is easy to use

If you are not sure about the answers to the questions, just check the “Fill in answers with sample data” checkbox on the first step. On the next steps the software will fill in the fields with some examples, so you can simply click “Next” and see how it works.

• If you are not sure about the answer on some step, just skip it.

Run it several times if needed

With each pass the wizard covers one “branch” of the strategy. For example, if you have in mind some customer related goal and you have more than one idea about how your business can satisfy this goal, then simply run the wizard once more.

Start Strategy Scorecard Wizard

What users say

BSC Designer helped me to define strategy that I used to improve my business: understanding the way I should serve my clients and how I should direct my efforts.

Ivan Rivera, Project Manager, PMP

Despite the complex concepts behind the BSC, BSC Designer is an intuitive tool that can lead the user step-by-step from the definition of KPIs to shaping their strategic map. The wizard is a friendly tool, the tutorials are easy to understand, and all its facilities and features help to shape useful and powerful software.

Some frequently asked questions

Here are the answers to some typical questions.

Is it free to use?

Yes. You build your strategy scorecard and in the end, you can create a free account with BSC Designer Online. You can use this account for 30-days without any obligations. At any time, you can export your scorecard to Excel and download your strategy map picture file.

How the answers processed?

All the answers are processed automatically by the software. The final strategy scorecard is for your eyes only and is not available publicly (unless you want to do so using the “sharing” function).

What is generated in the end?

If you answered all the questions, then you will see the results on the “Business goals,” “KPIs,” and “Strategy Map” tabs.

Can we add more perspectives?

The Wizard works with classical 4 perspectives, but you can add more perspectives if needed. Go to the “Business goals” or “KPIs” tab to change the perspectives.

How long does it take to pass through all steps?

It depends on how fast you generate the ideas. It normally takes about 5-10 minutes when key members of your team are involved in the process.

What questions does Wizard ask?

It asks questions necessary to build the strategy map, e.g. the questions about your goals, the way you plan to track their execution, and planned initiatives. Give it a try yourself!

Can we use it to brain storm new ideas about strategy?

Absolutely! The wizard will do the hard job of automation, and it will also suggest some ideas. At least it will focus your team on some typical strategic themes to look at.

Why it is 2.0?

The version 1.0. is one that exists in BSC Designer PRO for Windows (that one that Ivan Rivera wrote about above). The current version 2.0 is much better as it is:

• Cloud-based, and
• Suggests much better guidance for each step

How can we learn more about BSC Designer?

You can start with some training videos here.

The wizard looks nice, but we need more training about strategy/KPIs

There is some online training by the BSC Designer team, and you can find them in the Training section.

On September 2015, the United Nations (UN) organization introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and specific objectives to support these goals. Later in July 2017, the measurement part of SDGs was defined, adding 1-2 indicators for each of the objectives.

In this article, I´ll show step by step how organizations can align their strategies with these Sustainable Development Goals.

Getting started

The UN website is a comprehensive source of information on the topic. A starting point could be an official infographic. Before moving ahead with the details, it is also a good idea to learn about the general principles of the implementation of the SDGs.

Choose the goals and indicators

The next document to review is the detailed list of goals and indicators (Global indicator framework). For example, the English version of the Global indicator framework is located here.

The document is structured in the following way:

• First comes one of the global goals (respectively Goal 1… 17). For example, global Goal 7 is “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”
• Under each of the global goals you will find more specific objectives. For example, objective 7.2 is “By 2030, increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix”
• Finally, on the right from the objective you will find a target, or an indicator used to measure the objective´s performance. For example, for the goal 7.2, there is just one indicator – “7.2.1 Renewable energy share in the total final energy consumption”

What goals to choose?

It depends on the type of your organization and your current strategy. A good idea is to look at the SDG index for the countries where your organization branches are located and find the areas of the potential improvements at the country level.

Mapping the goals

To map the goals, you can use an existing strategy map, as probably you already have some goals that might sound a lot like the goals from SDGs. Alternatively, create a separate strategy map dedicated specifically to the SDGs.

Place the goals on the map. To make the goals visually appealing, consider using the official graphics provided by the UN.

Link your strategy to SDGs

Show how your goals contribute to the SDGs goals:

• Use links between the goals on your strategy map and the map with SDGs
• Calculate the targets/indicators of SDGs using the indicators from your scorecard

Software automation example

The example below will mostly make sense for BSC Designer software users. Other readers can benefit from the ideas described and follow a similar approach in the automation software that they use.

Map global goals

Create a new scorecard and place there the global goals that you plan to support. Instead of using the classical 4 perspectives, use Global goals. For example, if we choose global goals #4, #5, and #7 (see the “global indicator framework” mentioned above), the strategy map will look something like this:

Map specific objectives

Under each of the global goals we can now add relevant objectives. In the case of your organization, the objectives might be formulated more specifically. We can copy the original description of the objective into the “Description” field.

The resulting map will look like this:

Align indicators with the objectives

In the next step go to the KPIs tab to add relevant indicators there. In the global indicator framework, the indicators are listed in the column on the right:

It is a good idea to adjust the indicators to the realities of your organization, and add the original indicator in the description field.

Now, switch to the “Business goals” tab and link individual KPIs to the business goals using the “Link KPI” button:

The resulting strategy map will look this way:

Adding initiatives

The quick way to align some initiatives with global goals is to use the “Initiatives” button:

You can quickly map there some ideas, budget and time required.

That approach works well if you design a basic SDGs strategy map and don’t want to connect it to other strategy maps in your organization. If you already have some strategy maps in your organization and want to show how they are contributing to the global goals, then read the next 2 chapters.

Strategy Map Wizard – Balanced Scorecard in 6 Minutes

Answer simple questions - build a professional strategy map in 6 minutes.

Strategy formulation and description might be a time-consuming project even for an experienced strategist. This Strategy Scorecard Wizard will make the whole process fast and intuitive. Learn more!

Start now!

Align your strategy with SDGs goals

Now it’s time to show how your strategy is aligned with SDGs goals. To do this, we will need to link two scorecards by their business goals. On scorecard will be SDGs scorecard and another will be the scorecard with the strategy from your organization.

For example, the objective “Objective 7.2 – Increase the share of renewable energy” might be supported by the “Energy scorecard”

1. Go to the “Business goals” tab
2. Click the “Manage linked documents” button
3. Select the relevant scorecard (for example in my case it is “Energy production scorecard”)
4. Now, in the “contributed by” list you will see the goals from the linked scorecard. Select the one that fits, for example, “Create energy products that benefit customers”
5. The goal will now be visualized on the strategy map:

Data for the SDGs indicators

Now, let’s work on the data. How exactly is your organization affecting the performance of certain SDGs indicators? There are several ways to show this connection.

First, you can go directly to the KPIs tab and enter some data manually. For example, you can specify that the “5.5.1 – Proportion of seats held by women” in your organization is 47%:

Another way is to calculate the indicator’s data is by using data from other indicators. For example, inside the “4.4.1 Proportion of youth with ICT skills” indicator we can add an indicator from another scorecard. To do so, I selected indicator “4.4.1” and clicked on the “Add…” -> “New imported indicator”. Then I needed to select the source scorecard, and in this case, it might be an “Innovations scorecard” and the indicator that I want to use is the “% of employees who passed training for innovation” indicator.

We are not limited by one indicator only, so we can also add more indicators, for example, we can select the “Diversity and inclusion” indicator from the “HR” scorecard.

By default, the performance of the “4.4.1 Proportion of youth with ICT skills” will be calculated as an average of the performance of the child indicators. The benefit of this approach is that we can build indexes from indicators that are measured on different scales and use different measurement units:

Finally, data can be imported from MS Excel spreadsheet, external database, or introduced by a 3rd party tool via RESTFull API.

Improving visualization

Let’s improve the way the data is visualized.

• Go to the “Business goals” tab, select a goal and change the “Glyphs” to something relevant:

• Go to the “Strategy map” tab, use the “New picture” tool to add some of the official icons for the goals

Sharing your SDGs scorecard

You might want to make your SDGs 2030 scorecard public and share it with a local community. To do so check out the respective section of the manual.

Conclusion

No goals are achieved without action, so make sure that your organization and you personally work on the goals. Feel free to share your experience in the comments below and use the @GlobalGoalsUN hashtag proposed by UN.

Learn how to align big data initiatives with the strategy of your organization, and validate your efforts with Key Performance Indicators.

The end of the year is a good time to talk about emerging trends: self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things. What effect will these trends have on your business? How can you take into account a possible impact of these game-changing ideas? All the mentioned trends deserve a detailed analysis, but there is one that seems to be connected with all the others. I’m talking about Big Data. AI will need it, self-driving cars are based on it, and of course, it is already used by many businesses.

At BSC Designer we were talking a lot about KPIs and strategy. In this article I suggest discussing how a well described strategy and tailor-made KPIs can help to focus on big data efforts. Here is our plan for this article:

• Big data. What is it? What are the main challenges?
• KPIs for big data. 4 levels of KPIs and achieving strategic alignment.
• Action plan. Measurable implementation of big data.

What is big data?

Big data is about the analysis of large, unstructured datasets.

Big data can be characterized by 3 Vs:

• Volume. The datasets are supposed to be big. There are some estimations that it should be at least 10 GB or 1 TB, but probably a better criterion would be to say that big data is something that needs to be distributed (in terms of storage or computations). If you had to switch to Hadoop or a similar framework, then it is getting big.
• Variety. Think about different sources of structured and unstructured data. It can be mined from text, video, sales data, social media, weather forecast, or whatever makes sense in your context.
• Velocity. The high volume of the data is a result of fast data generation. Think about thousands of aircraft elements that are constantly monitored^[1], or about a constant flow of the comments in social media, or about real-time data that wearable devices provide.

Often (take IBM^[2] or EY^[3] as an example), there is also a fourth “V” that stands for “Veracity:”

• Veracity. When we are talking about data, we are always dealing with a certain level of uncertainty. How was the data obtained? Did we analyze all factors? Was it manipulated? Can we trust those numbers?

How is the data used?

Big data is used for a wide range of predictive and behaviour analysis. Organizations apply big data to reduce costs, understand customer needs better, and to mitigate risks. Think about a business that uses big data to deliver a tailor-made experience for the customers; think about fraud-check of an e-commerce provider.

In the beginning of the article I mentioned some emerging trends – big data is involved in all of them. To learn more about practical use of big data, I recommend continuing with “7 Amazing Companies That Really Get Big Data^[4]” by internationally recognized expert Bernard Marr.

Main challenges of big data

The described vision of big data sounds very ambitious. Why then are companies slow in adopting this new trend? What are the main challenges of big data?

Data mining is not a main challenge anymore

Later in October, I was speaking on a conference organized by SCIP^[5] (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals). The members of this organization deal with big data in the domains of market intelligence. The main theme of the conference was not about mining some CI/BI data as one might expect, it was about aligning business intelligence efforts with an organization’s strategy. In other words, once a company knows the questions that it wants to ask, the rest is relatively easy (see the surveys below for some data).

If data mining is not a problem anymore, what are the main challenges?

Challenge 1. Focusing big data

The main challenge is to focus big data on what matters, and then deliver it into the right hands. In other words, there should be someone in the organization who should start asking the right questions.

To illustrate this idea let’s take a Target story^[6] that was on the headlines back in 2012. This retailer successfully used shopper analytics data to predict that some of their clients were pregnant. Let’s look at the story (not taking into account the privacy-related part) and see what actually happened. Andrew Pole, a statistician who worked for Target was not just delivering all possible data, he got a very specific task from his colleagues from marketing – identify pregnant shoppers in their second trimester.

There was a focus and, there was a huge business value associated with this focus, as new parents tend to change their buying habits and buy everything at one retail shop. It was not about just playing with data, it was about finding data that would help to answer a very specific question.

Challenge 2. Alignment with business strategy

Big data will be game changing when it provides tangible business value. In other words, it should be clear how the big data initiatives are supporting a company´s strategy. NewVantage Partners in their Big Data Executive Survey^[7] asked respondents about cultural impediments to Big Data business adoption. 42.6% of respondents chose the answer “Insufficient organizational alignment.” Other options included a lack of adoption, lack of coherent data strategy, and a lack of a shared vision.

Getting back to the Target case, they were successful at addressing two important components:

1. Big data focused on a specific query: A data scientist was asked to identify pregnant shoppers in their second trimester.
2. Alignment with a business strategy: There was a clear business value for the data – families where a child was born become clients of one retail shop for a long time.

Challenge 3. Data security and privacy

This challenge is not in mainstream usage yet, but I think it is obvious for anyone that data collection and analysis must be ethical and legal. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes enforceable starting 25 May 2018 in Europe and there are similar regulations in other countries. Companies need to be much more serious about following data policies when processing personal data.

Let’s discuss the KPIs in the context of big data.

KPIs and Big Data

Is big data going to replace KPIs? Not exactly. The big data is going to power KPIs with more accurate and up-to-date insights.

Let’s take NPS (Net Promoter Score) as an example:

• NPS now. How is NPS (Net Promoter Score) calculated in your organization today? Probably you do some kind of customer survey on a quarterly basis. Thus, this indicator is lagging in time. If something happens to your business, the NPS will show it few months later.
• NPS powered by big data. Now, imagine that you use some big data tool that analyzes customer emotions in real time (see the Heedbook reference below). In this case your NPS will become a real-time KPI. Basically, you will be able to see the reaction of a specific client to a specific offer and to a specific sale approach.

In some cases, you will be interested in digging deeper into the data and getting to the specific situations, and in some cases you will need to see the aggregated data for the week, month, or year.

KPIs for big data

In the case of big data, we are talking about significant investments in the new tools and architecture, so it makes sense to monitor those initiatives with some hard data. The big data initiatives should also be quantified and measured. We can do this on several different levels.

Level 1. 3-V metrics

The 3Vs (Volume, Variety, Velocity) of big data can be easily quantified:

• Volume of data is a measure by itself (GB, TB, etc.)
• Variety can be quantified as the number of different types of data sources
• Velocity is defined by the volume of data generated/analyzed per time period

The fourth V – Veracity might be more difficult to quantify. You will need to define what your team qualifies as accurate data and that depends on the context. For example, for the combustion engine cars measuring of the current speed with an error level of +-5 km/h might be considered as accurate data, while for electric cars, it is not acceptable. Define 1-2 metrics that give an idea about data accuracy in your case.

Are the 3-V metrics useful? It depends on your context. Let’s take Google’s self-driving car as an example. The car produces 1GB of sensor data per second^[8]. That number looks impressive! We can estimate how big the big data, but those numbers won’t help us with the 3 challenges mentioned before.

Level 2. Big data process metrics

Let’s move to the next level of abstraction and have a look at the big data process. The simplified model is as following:

• Query
• Collection
• Analysis
• Reporting

The most useful metrics in this case are related to time:

• Frequency of data collection
• Time needed for data to be available for analysis
• Time needed for data to be reported in a form of KPIs

The benchmarks for timing depend on your business context. For example:

• The self-driving car needs to collect and analyze data in real-time, and the milliseconds of the difference matter, but
• In the case of NPS managers might be interested in reviewing aggregated weekly data

In terms of process efficiency, we can track the:

• Query to report conversion rate, %. In this case we must define the concept of a qualified query first, and then track the percentage of qualified queries that our data scientists were able to answer
• Data capturing capabilities. The accuracy level of the data that we capture (the ideas discussed above in Veracity).

The metrics from this level give us a better idea about how efficient big data is, but still, we don’t have a clue about the impact of big data on real business goals.

Level 3. Lagging KPIs. KPIs to validate big data success.

Another question is how to validate the success of big data initiatives in the company. On the one hand there are some significant investments in infrastructure, on the other hand big data should be paying back in the form of business insights. How can we measure a dollar value of those insights?

In this case we need to track the improvements that can be credited to using big data:

• What lessons do we learnt from big data? What cost saving was achieved after implementation of those ideas?
• How did the customer retention rate change due to delivering a tailor-made experience? How is customer lifetime value changing?
• Does big data help customer service to be more effective? How did the first-call resolution rate change?
• How did the hiring processes change after starting to use big data? How did the time to performance HR metric change?

As you can see on this level we use classical KPIs that we were using before. What we are trying to do is to credit certain improvements to the implementation of big data.

This approach might be biased:

• We tend to count positive changes as our achievements and
• We see negative changes as normal fluctuations that always happen.

The solution is to aim for bigger and more tangible targets.

Many organizations skill this measurement part and simply buy “some big data.” According to the report^[9] by Capgemini Consulting, 67% of the interviewed companies do not have a well-defined criteria to measure the success of their big data initiatives. Considering the amount of investment, companies should be more systematic in defining the goals and the success criteria of big data implementation.

Level 4. Leading KPIs. Ensuring big data success.

Now we know how to measure the outcome part of big data initiatives, but what about the leading part? What should we do to ensure a successful implementation of big data?

The hard part of the big data is quite tangible, we can measure it by such generic metrics as:

• Funds invested in big data initiatives
• Time spend on big data initiatives

Business goals focus big data

Here is a real scenario: a company invested millions of dollars in the infrastructure, tools, and big data collection with the Hadoop cluster, and nothing measurable happened. That’s what we were talking about in challenge 1: Big data is not AI, it cannot speak, and your team need to learn to ask the questions. How can we measure the role of the team then?

Here are some ideas to get started:

• Big data training effectiveness. Make sure that key members of your team have had some training on big data. They are not necessary becoming data scientists, but they need to know what questions they can ask and how to formulate those questions. The metrics in this case will be related to training effectiveness^[10].
• % of strategic goals with big data initiatives. We could track the number of big data queries formulated by each team, but this approach would be very formal and less useful. A better option is to track the alignment between goals and big data queries. Ask your team to look at their strategic goals and then discuss what data they might need to make better decisions in the context of those goals.

Big data helps to formulate new business goals

The process of matching business context and big data is bidirectional. Sometimes we have a specific challenge in mind and then are looking for specific big data tools (like in the case with Target), sometimes we find an interesting tool and then try to match it with our goals. Here are some examples:

• Someone in your team found Heedbook^[11], a service that analyzes customer’s emotions in real time. The service is built on Microsoft’s Azure and is available in the Cloud. Your client service team might come up with an idea to use this service to calculate their NPS better.
• Your IT personnel were challenged with finding a DLP (Data loss prevention) software. They came across SearchInform^[12] that not only can analyze communications and transmitted files, but can also enforce specific security policies. The IT strategy of your organization can be updated by taking into account the possibilities of the DLP tool.

In any case, it is a good idea to match specific business goals with the requirements for the big data.

Action plan. Make big data measurable.

Let’s formulate some takeaways from this article. I prefer to do it in the form of an action plan.

1. Revise big data. How the data is collected now, what data capturing capabilities you have (use the big data process metrics as a framework).
2. Do your homework. Have your strategy formulated on the strategy map, and cascaded to the business units. Review your current KPIs.
3. Improve capabilities. Plan the initiatives to address the team’s capabilities in terms of big data. Key members should understand what questions they can ask, and how to formulate those questions.
4. Focus big data efforts. Review your strategy map, spot the opportunities where the big data can support business goals. Formulate big data queries.
5. Implementation. Analyze the insights delivered by big data, reflect them in the form of KPIs where needed.

A short guide for users of BSC Designer software

As a user of BSC Designer you have a powerful software that will automate many of the strategy alignment and KPIs aspects discussed in this article:

• Strategic alignment and focusing big data. Create a strategy map to present your business goals; align KPIs with the goals on the map. If you don’t have a strategy map yet, then use a strategy map wizard to get started.

Strategy Map Wizard – Balanced Scorecard in 6 Minutes

Answer simple questions - build a professional strategy map in 6 minutes.

Strategy formulation and description might be a time-consuming project even for an experienced strategist. This Strategy Scorecard Wizard will make the whole process fast and intuitive. Learn more!

Start now!

• Ensuring that a team has big data capabilities. Use a training scorecard (you can start with this example) to make sure that your team has the necessary capabilities for working with big data.
• Powering KPIs with big data. Track performance metrics for the big data initiatives; use RESTFul API to enter real-time big data reports into the indicators.

If you are not a user yet, then you can start with a free trial version of BSC Designer, which is available online.

References