【正文】 ommon PitfallsWhen Kaplan and Norton’s second book, The Strategy Focused Organization was published, the Harvard Business Review hailed the Balanced Scorecard as one of the most significant contributions to management practice in the last 75 years. However, despite its wellpublicized successes, the majority of organizations that adopt a scorecard fail to reap the rewards they expect. In researching these disappointments, some mon themes stand out: 1. Measures that do not focus on strategy. A mon problem is that an organization will adopt some new nonfinancial measures, but fail to align the measures adequately with strategy. According to Dr. Norton,“The biggest mistake that organizations make is thinking that the scorecard is just about measures. Quite often they will develop a list of financial and nonfinancial measures and believe they have a scorecard. This, I believe, is dangerous.”For example, in one case a bank’s IT department had identified measures and benchmarks for being a world class IT department. According to those measures, they had done very well. However, the measures used by the IT department were not tied in with the overall business strategy and therefore discouraged the IT department from meeting the strategic business needs. 2. Failure to municate and educate. A scorecard is only effective if it is clearly understood throughout an organization. Frequently, scorecards will be developed at the executive level, but not municated or cascaded down through an organization. Without effective munication throughout the organization, a balanced scorecard will not spur lasting change and performance improvement. 3. Measures tied to pensation too soon. It is generally a good idea to tie pensation to the Balanced Scorecard. However, several factors suggest it can be a mistake to do that too early in the lifecycle of the scorecard. Rarely is an initial scorecard left unrevised. So, if an organization ties pensation to measures that are not in fact driving desired behavior, a powerful motivator has been instituted that will drive an unwise action. Data may be inplete or inaccurate, so measures may not be correct. If employees’ paychecks are adversely impacted, serious morale problems and invalidation of the scorecard inevitably result. It may take time to determine realistic targets, and penalizing people for failing to achieve an unreachable target will surely have a negative impact on morale and eventually profits.4. No accountability. Accountability and high visibility are needed to help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source, and initiative must have an owner. Without this level of detailed implementation, a perfectly constructed scorecard will not achieve success, because nobody will be held accountable for performance. 5. Employees not empowered. While accountability may provide strong motivation for improving performance, employees must also have the authority, responsibility and tools necessary to impact relevant measures. Otherwise they will resist involvement and ownership. Resources must be made available, and initiatives funded, to achieve success. Employees are likely to need new information tools to help them understand the drivers of measures for which they are responsible so they can take action. These tools can include systems for analysis and early warning indicators, exception reports and collaboration. 6. Too many initiatives. Large, decentralized organizations usually find that crossover and duplication among initiatives can be identified. Crossmatching scorecard objectives with current and planned initiatives can be an important way to focus and align a pany. This method will identify cases where objectives are supported inappropriately. Rather than relying on budgeting for strategic funding, this process eliminates waste, speeds scorecard implementation, and helps an organization prioritize their initiatives to better support their strategy.Automating the Balanced ScorecardA successful BSC program relies extensively on data, education, and munication to promote, monitor, and reinforce behavior modifications—all processes that can be facilitated easily by information technology.Automation is EssentialAutomation is essential in order to manage the vast amount of information related to a pany’s mission and vision, strategic goals, objectives, perspectives, measures, causal relationships, and initiatives. The alternative is a manual process, which significantly increases the effort and cost of scorecard development and sets back progress in the early stages of the BSC development, when momentum is critical. Automation can foster quicker culture change, both during development and in the ongoing use of the BSC. If the software used is intuitive and can be deployed through an organization readily, it can bring visibility to the BSC process, ease a cultural transition, and enable participation by a wider audience.Approaches to AutomationA number of software development panies have sought to develop an automated solution and capitalize on the success of the Balanced Scorecard. Various approaches to BSC automation exist, depending on the orientation of the software pany: Proprietary business intelligence (BI) products. One class of scorecard automation software has formed around proprietary BI software products. BI software is designed to support an organization’s reporting and analysis needs. Naturally, a BI software vendor will see the BSC as an extension of BI, and so will develop it as an addon to their product line. While these packages can meet some of the analytical needs that support a balanced scorecard, they tend to have several limitations: They can lead an organization to focus on measures derived from available data rather than strategic objectives. They do not generally provide needed capabilities with regard to strategy munication and managing nonnumeric informati