Without commonly understood definitions of the organization’s main goals and a consistently defined view of performance, managers find it difficult to understand how the company is performing overall, whether the organization is going in the right direction, and who is responsible for taking corrective actions. Managers do not have a way that enables them to monitor their departments’ performance about the overall strategy. Employees have little to no opportunity to collaborate and participate in decision-making. So despite an abundance of data, organizations still make many key decisions based only on best guesses.

IT-Blocks Balanced Scorecards solution is part of our powerful business intelligence solutions portfolio. The solution is addressing those very specific common pains and challenges that face most enterprises and organizations, especially the lack of proper strategic planning and monitoring.

Our solution, not only applies the Harvard Business Review featured “Balanced Scorecards” concept by Kaplan & Norton, but also adapts to both profit and nonprofit organizations, especially those located in the Arab world and the Middle East. IT-Blocks Balanced Scorecards solution is a Multilanguage solution that has been implemented in Arabic and was met with great success. IT-Blocks Balanced Scorecards solution allows direct access to Business Intelligence reports, analysis, and alerts that help business users go beyond their usual metrics to analyze and understand the factors that drive individual and collaborative performance. It provides managers with the relevant tactical information they need to translate the overall strategy into action. Users can access BI reports, analysis, dashboards, and other content from the scorecard environment to analyze the factors that affect performance.

Our solution enables organizations to:

• Set and view their vision to all employees
• Set their strategy map
• View achievement summary from within the strategy map page with no need to navigate into another
• KPIs details and ratings for each of the balanced scorecards four perspectives (Financial, Customer, Internal business processes and Learning and Growth)
• Create Initiatives to improve performance as well as monitor their progress and change
• Detailed performance and achievement reporting on the Department level as well as on the organization level to give a holistic view of decision makers
• Manifesting the “Cause and Effect” concept that separates the Balanced Scorecards solution from other performance management systems; the measures appearing on the Scorecards link together in a series of cause and effect relationships to tell the organization's strategic story

IT-Blocks Balanced Scorecards software is built over IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V.10 environment, which enables our solution to pull data from diverse sources and lets users present the metrics in a consistent manner across the enterprise from discrete tactical projects to company-wide initiatives. Cognos Business Intelligence software provides scorecard capabilities that enable users to create, manage and present the company’s critical metrics. Users throughout the organization can understand the dynamic cause-and-effect relationships of key processes behind those metrics. IT-Blocks Balanced Scorecards solution drives accountability with a consistent and reliable source of metrics for individual employees, managers and executives. Most importantly, it links individual decisions and initiatives to goals and strategy.

To support immediate awareness of issues, users can choose to be notified any time the status of a metric change. Alerts can be automatically delivered through email, allowing the user to see at a glance which metrics need immediate attention. If performance falls below a designated threshold, users can be alerted and take immediate action. They can also access related business intelligence sources and reports to analyze the underlying causes, and collaborate with others to find a solution. Ultimately, the solution helps business users quickly find answers to common questions such as:-

• How have we performed against this metric in the past?
• Who is involved in solving this problem? Have corrective actions been taken?
• What are the factors driving performance?
• What other processes or metrics are affected?

To cope with with any technology used at the customer site, our solution includes a heterogeneous set of technology tools. For instance, ETL (Extract-Transformation-Load) tool is implemented to transfer data from customer’s operation databases to the staging area and another ETL tool to transfer the data from the staging area to main Data warehouse. A data entry system is also developed to collect data from non-automated data sources. Last but not least, a security system was implemented to define different roles and responsibilities of various users of the system.