Scorecarding

Raising expectations for public sector performance has driven many public organisations to use scorecarding to monitor and manage their way to improved performance—with well-documented successes. Scorecarding provides the means to capture and clearly articulate the organisation’s strategy, align all stakeholders and employees toward those goals, and help measure and manage the organisation’s progress towards those objectives.

The private sector has always had a strong focus on performance, monitoring and improvement. This focus has given birth to many of the recent management trends—Total Quality Management (TQM), re-engineering, Six-Sigma, and Activity-Based Accounting, to name a few. Scorecarding is one of these tools, and the Balanced Scorecard is a specific instance of scorecarding. The Balanced Scorecard has been slowly gaining support over the last 15 years due to its impressive track-record of well-documented performance improvements.

Over the past five years, momentum has been building in the public sector for scorecarding, in particular the Balanced Scorecard. Application of the Balanced Scorecard in the public sector is similar to its application in the private sector, with some notable exceptions. These exceptions are based on a combination of the types of things public sector organisations do, the structure of public sector organisations, and the culture within those organisations.

Cognos Scorecarding builds on our extensive public sector experience of applying this technique, allowing us to produce rapidly a system tailored to meet the needs of individual organisations. This enables leaders and managers to monitor their key metrics across divisions and locations. The Cognos solution is streamlined and easy to use, offers a unique pool of proven metrics, and generates robust management information and analysis.