Strategy map

One of the big challenges faced in the design of Balanced Scorecard-based performance management systems is deciding what activities and outcomes to monitor.

By providing a simple visual representation of the strategic objectives to be focused on, along with additional visual cues in the form of the perspectives and causal arrows, the strategy map has been found useful in enabling discussion within a management team about what objectives to choose, and subsequently to support discussion of the actual performance achieved.

[9] Despite these concerns, the 'standard' set of perspectives remains the most common, and traditionally is arrayed on the strategy map in the sequence (from bottom to top) "Learning & Growth", "Internal Business Processes", "Customer", "Financial" with causal arrows tending to flow "up" the page.

In other words, Learning and Growth drive Internal Process change which impacts Customer Satisfaction which in turn improves Profitability.

In the early part of the century, it was recognized that the perspective Learning and Growth was lacking significant investment areas, that of infrastructure and IT.