Corporate Vision to Employee Goals - Is it integrated in your organization?
Guest post by
Swati Maskara, Associate Consultant, Oracle Business Intelligence practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Setting goals is important only to the extent if their success is monitored and information is critical only to the extent if it facilitates action. Integration between defining, communicating, monitoring and correcting strategic objectives has always been a thirst area for organizations. Every organization has employees asking the same question - "How are my objectives and goals linked to my organization's corporate vision, mission and objectives?".
I recently got a chance to explore OBIEE 11g's new functionality - Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management - and I was impressed by the features provided. Measuring, communicating and monitoring are the three key words that define the Scorecard functionality in OBIEE 11g. Let us explore how each is performed better using Oracle Scorecard.
Measurement
- Measure success using KPIs
- KPI builder allows building multidimensional Hierarchical KPIs
- While defining the KPIs users can set the thresholds within which performance is acceptable
- KPIs can be sourced from ERP or CRM applications, a data warehouse, BI or Performance Management System and integrated with scorecard
Communication
- New visualizations such as KPI watchlist, Strategy Tress, Strategy Maps, Cause and effect Maps and Custom Views
- KPI watchlist can be used to drill down into various levels of data which the user is authorized to view
- The tool also improves user interface by introducing a comprehensive range of new interactive charting and prompting capabilities, including map visualization options
Monitoring
- Action Framework Feature: Users can also send email alerts, trigger ERP workflows and BPEL Processes, Invoke web services and execute Java Methods by defining contextual actions within the OBIEE Action framework
Lets us understand the scorecard functionality by taking an example of a Consumer durable manufacturer and distributor which aims at increasing the overall market share by 10%. This is the main objective or the organization wide goal of the company. All the departments - Sales, HR, Finance, and Marketing etc have to channel efforts towards achieving this main objective.
Now different departments or units of the organization would have a different perspectives towards this main objective. Oracle Scorecard comes with four such predefined perspectives namely Financial, Customer, Internal Business Process and Learning & Growth (Balanced Scorecard). Users also have the flexibility to create custom perspectives according to organization's requirement. Now, looking at the goal from a financial perspective would involve setting up objectives like increasing revenue by 20% or Increasing Bank Finance by 10% etc. These parent objectives can be further divided into child objectives like reducing COGS, reducing price per unit, improving linkages with Financial Institutions etc. Once the objectives are defined at the most detailed level then various KPIs can be built using KPI builder.
Such detailed definition of organization's objective along with an integrated action framework enables employees within the organization to:
- Evaluate the impact of their actions on achieving success and hence appreciate how their individual objectives are helping in achieving organization's overall goals
- Initiate discussion threads and attach documents thus facilitating greater understanding of organizational KPIs as well as better collaboration with other users
- Align their actions in the best possible way to meet the end objectives hence ensuring corrective actions are taken well on time
Thus the system was rightly referred to as "closed loop BI system" by Oracle at its launch as it closes the loop between insight and action by enabling users to get real time notifications and alerts and at the same time facilitating them to initiate actions directly from dashboard. It also facilitates information sharing between users through its Annotations Attachments and Collaborations facility.
The Scorecard functionality holds potential to organize strategic thinking within an organization and monitor the progress towards achieving strategic goals but how is this new functionality going to be leveraged by organizations and to what extent is yet to be seen. However the buzz around this functionality seems to be catching up.
