I had the pleasure of interviewing Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management for Oracle Corporation, about the use of embedded actions in scorecards and their effect on organizations. Most discussions about scorecards typically focus on traffic lights or maps, grids of numbers or objective definitions, but this discussion had an interesting twist. Jacques told our audience how actions, defined and embedded into scorecards, can improve individual performance and improve the ability to execute strategy.
We started the discussion with Jacques’ definition of a scorecard. Jacques told us that scorecards are a set of tools and techniques that extend the Business Intelligence (BI) system to provide a language that can be used to define a corporate strategy and to define the goals and objectives that support achieving that strategy. Scorecards also provide a set of tools to enable businesses to define key business metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that are in support of the strategy. All of this is to effect change – if you cannot effect change, then you are wasting your time.
So how do actions fit into this definition? Jacques told us that actions are a complementary technique to effect change – you define actions with objectives, goals and KPIs, enabling the user of the scorecard to perform the action complementary to the status of the object based on who they are. What kind of actions are we talking about? According to Jacques, there are three basic types of actions:
+ Navigation to another system or website
+ Trigger scripts or Java methods to invoke sophisticated tasks
+ Trigger any Oracle Fusion Application workflow
“Actions are a real strong suit for Oracle,” said Jacques. They are also a differentiator. All key business workflows from Oracle Fusion Applications are available as web services and because of this, Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management can surf through and use a repository of thousands of Fusion Application business processes and workflows. With this in mind, business users can choose to associate workflows with objectives, KPIs and initiatives, and trigger them based on who is viewing the scorecard object and the status the object is currently in.
Some actions are as simple as linking to another system to dig deeper into a KPI to understand the roots of the data, or launching into the HR system to look at an HR record for an employee whose scorecard you are currently viewing (with permission, of course). But you can also do much more sophisticated things like trigger a true workflow. Jacques gave the following HR example. Let’s say your competitors have been pillaging your staff and hiring them so your headcount KPI is in steady decline. Based on the status of the KPI and the fact that you are logged into the system, from your dashboard or scorecard you can trigger a workflow action to open a job requisition in another system. And because this business workflow is available as a web service with Single Sign-On to OSSM, you do not need to leave the OSSM environment.
Jacques also gave other examples of workflow actions that can be triggered such as presenting forms to fill out to adjust a forecast or some kind of data capture that makes sense. Actions can be reactive or proactive in nature and you can choose to do different things based on the data. Actions can support individual jobs, departmental functions and/or corporate strategy.
In short, actions do speak louder in scorecards.
To listen to the entire podcast, click here.
To learn more about Oracle Scorecard and Strategy management, click here.
↧
Actions Speak Louder in Scorecards
↧