Balanced Scorecard

Introduction

Part of ISD’s strategy to become “the premier” IT professional services and solutions provider to the US Intelligence community will include the implementation of a continuous improvement infrastructure. In order, to ensure ISD strive to become “the premier IT and professional services and solutions provider to the US Intelligence Community,” ISD will need to implement the needed business enhancement such Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard. ISD can enhance performance measurement capabilities by using modern business intelligence tools and technology. Because this is a major undertaking critical to the continued growth of ISD, it needs the balanced scorecard techniques and the use of business intelligence to measure themselves.

Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard together will provide ISD with rewarding benefits if executed strategically. Lean Six Sigma combines the two most important improvement trends of our time; making work better (using Six Sigma) and making Work faster (using Lean principles). Six Sigma is an integrated, disciplined approach for reducing errors and producing measurable financial results.(Six Sigma, 2011) Lean principles are used to identify ‘waste’ or ‘non-value-added activities’ from the customer perspective and then determine how to eliminate them the ‘right’ way. Combined, Lean and Six Sigma create a business improvement methodology that maximizes shareholder value by achieving the fastest rate of improvement in customer satisfaction, cost, quality, process speed, and invested capital. The fusion of Lean and Six Sigma improvement methods is required because:

• Lean cannot bring a process under statistical control

• Six Sigma alone cannot dramatically improve process speed or reduce invested capital

• Both enable reduction of the cost of complexity

One of the major hurdles faced when implementing Lean Six Sigma is the quality of the data being used to measure improvement and to make important business decisions. (George, Jones, 2055 Therefore, a proven methodology is needed to ensure the information being used is accurate and that the items being measured are critical in meeting the strategic goals of the company. At the ISD Executive level, the balanced scorecard is the best option for addressing these issues. The balanced scorecard is a management system (not only a measurement system) that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. (Kaplan and