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Running head: IMPLEMENTATION OF BALANCE SCORECARD

IMPLEMENTATION OF BALANCE SCORECARD

Implementation of Balance Scorecard

Name

Institution

Subject

Date

I agree with the statement that ‘Cattaraugus County Rehabilitation Center did an effective job of implementing a balanced scorecard approach in a fashion that reflects their organizational mission and vision.’ The new Director of strategy has successfully hit the nail on the head by coming up with a way of implementing the balanced scorecard paradigm in a not for profit organization. He has realized the incessantly growing need for organizations to change and improve if the centre is to survive and thrive in the ever changing environment/topography of organization life and perpetual existence.

Any organization needs to continuously evolve and always find a way to ensure its sustainability.

The organizational topography is fast changing and new trends are continuously emerging. Every organization has to move with the changing times if it wants to survive. The organizational environment and topography is changing in all aspects and in the near future, a lot will have evolved to something that is hardly recognizable. Some of the expected new trends include the changing workforce trends, customer needs and service delivery. The rehabilitation centre will be able to cope with these present and expected challenges through the use of the balanced scorecard.

Some of the present and anticipated future changes that this approach is and will be able to counter include; The skills gap shrinks. The Bureau of Labor statistics reported that as of end of 2012, there were over 12 million people who were unemployed and 3.6 million open positions. American Manufacturers had 600,000 unfilled positions and 34% of the companies said they were having trouble filling open positions. This skills gap will continuously shrink as new talent enters the workforce; companies are now working with schools to train the next generation workforce. The rehabilitation centre is also covered in this area of anticipated future challenge. This problem is already being provided for in the centre through its Learning and Growth Perspective. The learning and growth perspective, which has been identified as the foundation of any strategy involves a determination of employee capabilities and skills, technology, and a corporate climate needed to support a strategy. The centre has as its objective in this focus area the objective to Increase staff competencies, Provide personal growth opportunities to employees, Promote, train & practice corporate values, among others.

Another trend that will be changing is the leadership trends in organizations. The centre is covered against this uncertainty by its objective to develop & retain personnel who will inturn grow to be the centre’s future leaders.

The balanced scorecard also recognizes the need to focus on both leadership strategies and leadership development strategies through its Internal Business Processes perspective and

Learning and Growth perspective. Without proper leadership, even the best and boldest strategies die, their potential being never realized.

The balanced scorecard will also enable the rehabilitation centre to adopt technology. Being technologically savvy is a trend in both leadership/management and operation that the present and future leader will need and which is key to organizational effectiveness. Technological savvy has rapidly become an integral aspect of today’s operational effectiveness. Technology facilitates communication among leaders and employees, regardless of their physical location or when the communication needs to occur. As Bersin puts it, leading and managing virtually is already a reality, and requirements to lead geographically dispersed units and teams will only increase. Technology will play a major role in dealing effectively with this challenge and the balanced scorecard creates the best model to adopt this.

Another plus to the choice of the use of the BSC (Balanced Score Card) is the Emphasis on employee engagement.- Employers are still having major retention problems and this is costing them a fortune. They are now focusing more on employee engagement to increase their retention rates. A recent survey by MSW Research and Dale Carnegie Training found only a mere 29% of employees are fully engaged. This therefore meets the centre’s strategy to increase employee’s attachment to the organizations values and a deeper regard of the values- based culture that the centre has adopted.

The focus of the approach on the consumer as the most important concern to the stakeholder is perhaps the most important move by the strategic plan of the rehabilitation centre. Any other for profit organization that adopts the balance scorecard has always placed financial aspect at the top of the paradigm, but the centre has switched this Finasncial aspect with the consumer aspect, the consumer aspect therefore coming before the financial aspect. This show that the strategy is very much in line with the centre’s vision to be a leader in providing and assessing desired services to people with disabilities. This has made it very clear to all that service to people with disability comes above all else.

This case analysis shows provides a strong conviction that the Balanced score card is an impeccable tool for management of any organization. It provides a clear context of what the organization is all about and enables the organization to focus on what is truly important to the organization. The BSC then enables the organization to break down their main focus area into attainable and measurable metrics such that the organization is able to track its progress towards attaining their most important target that will be the eventual attainment of their mission. The Balance Scorecard has proven, through this case analysis, to be multi faceted. It can be applied in any organization and will enable the organization to focus on their main reason of existence, which is their mission, and then enable them to breakdown this ultimate goal to measurable metrics such that the organization will be able to track their progress toward the ultimate goal. Through the case analysis, the balanced score card paradigm has been employed in a not for profit organization, whose unlike other organizations, is not  Profit focused and yet the model has managed to enable the organization to come up with metrics that it can use to track its progress towards achieving the mission. This proves that the BSC model is applicable in any organization wishing to find its position in achieving its mission and coming up with small measurable targets that will lead to the eventual attainment of the mission.

References

1. Gordon Walker (2009), Modern Competitive Strategy, McGraw-Hill International Edition.

2. Lamb, Robert, Boyden, Competitive strategic management, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984

3. The Top Ten Workforce Trends - Institute for Global Futures, Retrieved on 12th April 2014 from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CIgBEBYwCQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalfuturist.com

4. Martello, M., Watson, J., Fischer, M., (2008). Implementing a balanced scorecard in a not-for-profit organization. Journal of Business & Economics Research. 6(9), 67-80. Retrieved from: http://journals.cluteonline.com/index.php/JBER/ article/view/2471/2517

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