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December, 2007

Making Scorecards Actionable Newsletter # 30 (2007)

Content of Making Scorecards Actionable Newsletter # 30 (2007)

» Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

» “Controllerhandboken” in new edition

» Nordic workshop on Management Control at Linköping University

» Making Scorecards Actionable in Thai translation

» Encouraging interaction between research and practice by using BSC



MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Yet another year is coming to an end – a year where we have spent most of our time in various hands-on projects. We kicked of 2007 with a large project for a European utility company, where we contributed with an analysis of the relationship between the corporation’s business controllers and the kind of management control procedures they wanted to use. The project delivered a thorough description of the individual controllers’ and controller functions’ orientation towards the four roles: Book keeper, Analyst, Teacher and Change Agent.

In addition to this control-focused project, we have also been engaged in half a dozen strategy projects, where we have helped organizations create strategy maps and translate them in to operational scorecards.

As always, we have also contributed in both academic and practitioners-oriented education. The most interesting seminar we participated in (May 2007) focused on advanced BSC practitioners. The seminar was a great success, and we hope to run a similar seminar during the spring 2008 (http://www.civilekfor.se/templates_epilite/Page____3139.asp).

During the year we have spent most time in client engagements. Therefore, we have not written as much as we usually do. On the other hand, we have gained much new experience that we intend to reflect on and publish next year. Even though we did not write any new articles on Actionable Scorecards, we updated our article for Controllerhandboken that will be published in the beginning of the next year.



“CONTROLLERHANDBOKEN” IN NEW EDITION

A new edition of Controllerhandboken will be published in the spring of 2008. Controllerhandboken is the Scandinavian book of reference regarding business controllers, controllership and controller tools. In this edition, professor Nils-Göran Olve acts as co-editor, and the structure of the book as been fundamentally redesigned since last edition. Our article about balanced scorecard has, however, only undergone minor changes and updates.
For more information about the Controller handbook, follow this link: http://www.industrilitteratur.se/bookpage.asp?bestnr=V010057



NORDIC WORKSHOP ON MANAGEMENT CONTROL AT LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY

An academic workshop on management control will be organized at Linköping University, January 31 to February 2. The purpose of the conference is to allow dialogue and reflection among Nordic management control researchers. Carl-Johan Petri and Nils-Göran Olve has submitted the paper “Discovering the Business Controller’s role”, where they present a questionnaire they have developed to capture the controller’s orientation towards one or more of the four roles book keeper, analyst, teacher and change agent (also referred to above in the project for the European utility company).

The assumption is that the role(s) the controller is assuming is a result of (1) her own beliefs about what a controller should be, (2) her perception of what line-managers’ expect of her and (3) the activities she is performing.

For more information about the Nordic workshop on management control; follow this link: http://www.iei.liu.se/content/1/c6/08/06/12/Inbjudan_konferens_080131.pdf



MAKING SCORECARDS ACTIONABLE IN THAI TRANSLATION
by Nils-Göran Olve

The much awaited Thai translation of Making Scorecards Actionable is now available. If you have read it, please send us a note and tell us what you think about the book (send the mail to carl-johan.petri@makingscorecardsactionable.com).

The Thai version of the book can be found here: http://www.se-ed.com/eshop/Book/BookDetail.aspx?No=9789749457733&TypeMCode=BK&ProdMCode=º¸



ENCOURAGING INTERACTION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE BY USING BSC

Could strategy maps and scorecards improve collaboration between temporary partners? We believe so, if they can make the benefits (“win-win”) for everyone convincing and tangible. Increasingly, businesses are “incomplete” in the sense of linking up with others for important functions. Such partnerships often are long-lasting and involve collaboration and trust that go far beyond what can be regulated in normal contracts. Articulating how both sides stand to benefit from collaborating through a strategy map may then be attractive.

A special case of this, that we have explored lately, is what happens between researchers and the organization they study. The International Journal of Action Research Vol. 3(2007) No. 3 will be a special issue devoted to interactive research, a concept that has been defined in various ways but in general denotes close cooperation between researcher and practitioners. With my Linköping University colleagues Fredrik Nilsson and Petter Ahlström, I first wrote an article in Swedish about our experiences of this for a forthcoming anthology, which resulted in an invitation to contribute to this special issue of IJAR. Our article is called Mobilising and nurturing collaboration in research – the value of a focused imagination and will be available in a few weeks time. It reuses concepts from a book I collaborated on in the nineties, Virtual organizations and beyond (Bo Hedberg et al.; Wiley 1996 and 2000), and my scorecard experiences together with Carl-Johan Petri and Jan Roy.

For an effective and lasting interplay between researchers, the organisation they study, and sometimes also the financers of the research, we believe it is desirable that all share a conviction that theirs is a promising and fruitful collaboration. Both sides should benefit, and each should feel that the partner is close to an optimal one. Establishing and nurturing contacts are important and time-consuming elements of interactive research. It is usually the researcher who has to establish and nurture collaboration with practitioners – a task that is not normally part of traditional research, or at least not much discussed in the literature on research methodology and taught when you study to be a researcher.

A mutual interest in the subject of the research is a prerequisite for collaboration, but there are quite often other factors that explain why interactive research collaborations come about and endure. In the article, we propose strategy maps as a tool for visualizing the logic for such a collaboration. We compare them with virtual or imaginary organisations, where of the partners – usually but not always the researchers – will try to mobilize the talents, efforts, and enthusiasm of the others for their own benefit, at the same time hopefully improving its partners’ possibilities to gain. Quite often, an imaginary organisation enables partners to link into and gain from each others’ capabilities, which may also improve by being applied to new uses. For instance, a business firm can use a neighbouring university as its outsourced research department, while the university gains access to a test site for new ideas.

But this is often easier said than done. In the cases we tell about in our article, there were sometimes long periods of doubt where the researchers worried that they were seen as low-paid consultants, and business executives may have felt that they fulfilled promises they had made as a service to society, rather than being convinced that they themselves could benefit from the research. A clearer shared understanding of benefits from collaborating, for instance in the shape of a strategy map and scorecard, might have helped.

To be sure, there are sometimes important problems in an open discussion about the “imagination” governing research collaboration. Having achieved access, researchers may be reluctant to disclose immediately the extent of collaboration they need. Business executives may hope to avoid hiring consultants by instead exploiting their new academic contacts, and feel uneasy in saying so. Or they believe research to have no practical use and engage just because it seems good P.R. to have their firm written about as one worth studying. But even if some motives may be less presentable, it should be useful to explore how both sides may benefit from collaborating. Expectations become possible to live up to only when they are made visible. Clarifying them will make it natural to build in checkpoints where both sides look for further learning opportunities, ways to publicize findings jointly, etc.

Our impression on the basis of the experience gained in a number of interactive research projects is that collaborating partners need to improve their skills in articulating expectations and potential benefits. Strategy maps for individual research collaborations may be linked to overarching such maps for a university, and serve as a clarification of its intentions in relation to its business community. For instance, my university developed such a map (albeit a very general one – see http://www.lith.liu.se/styrelse/strategi/strategikarta.pdf ), and it would be interesting to explore interactive research with local businesses as an avenue to mutual benefits.

Similar arguments exist why other imaginary organisations could benefit from using strategy maps. This more general discussion is something we’d like to come back to some day. In the meantime, we know few applications of strategy maps and scorecards to collaborations like these, i.e. interactive research programmes, universities’ community relations, or imaginary/virtual organisations in general. We would be happy to collaborate with you to develop such cases – or just receive information from those who already did!






MAKING SCORECARDS ACTIONABLE NEWSLETTER is a bi-monthly update on our experiences and opinions on how scorecards and strategy maps can be made actionable – to help organisations realise their intended business strategies. The newsletter is compiled and distributed for free by the authors of the book “Making Scorecards Actionable – Balancing Strategy and Control”. Also make sure to check out www.makingscorecardsactionable.com to get up to date information about our seminars, to evaluate your organisation’s BSC skills according to our computerised BSC Analyser and to download presentations from the document archive.
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