Guidelines in corporate management

The Balanced Scorecard – Translating Strategy into Action

Introduction
Public transport organizations face many barriers when trying to execute the strategy formed by their corporate managements. Some of these common barriers include: • The vision barrier, which arises when most managers and employees do not really understand the organization’s strategy. The people barrier, which arises when only a small portion of managers have some incentives regarding strategy and performance. The management barrier, which arises when most management teams spend only a small amount of time discussing strategy. The resource barrier, which arises when most of the business units fail to link their daily work and therefore their budgets to the overall strategy.

•

•

•

Balanced Scorecard was developed by Robert Kaplan, a professor at Harvard University and David Norton, a consultant from Boston. They began developing the approach after leading a research study of a dozen companies exploring new methods of performance measure. Kaplan and Norton put together a system that was able to measure a variety of activities throughout the organization: customer issues, internal business processes, employee activities and the concerns of shareholders. Under the Balanced Scorecard system, a company’s financial results are “balanced” and interlinked with all of these perspectives. This scorecard was successfully adopted by a number of organizations and the results summarized in a book Balanced Scorecard, published in 1996. Since then many organizations have adopted the approach and shown how effectively there are fulfilling their missions. The system has also grown in popularity among Public Transport companies.

Most of these barriers can be overcome by using the Balanced Scorecard, which combines the historical accuracy of financial numbers with