In today's highly connected business environment, the pace of change is rapid and the pressure to keep up unprecedented. Business today is about visibility and responsiveness -- the ability to change course fluidly to react to movements in the marketplace. Faster cycles of scrutiny on performance against expectations are increasingly demanded across tactical, operational, and strategic business measures to uncover potential risks.

Faced with the pressures of the economic downturn and the challenge of properly preparing for the upturn, executives from companies of all sizes and sectors are now, more than ever before, focused on their organization's strategic priorities. These range from driving innovation and launching products to managing human and operational resources and increasing overall shareholder value.

Executives who are responsible for their organization's overall strategy and associated business performance need a winning strategy to better leverage the myriad of information available to them to make more strategic decisions and gain competitive advantage for 21st century growth.

Business analytics significantly contributes to that winning strategy. A recent IBM study of 400 business executives finds that companies which use insights from analytics are weathering the economic storm better that companies that don't. The study also revealed that top performing companies are 15 times more likely to apply analytics to strategic decisions than their underperforming peers.

Scorecards, a valuable component of any company's business analytics toolbox, play an essential role in helping management teams make better strategic decisions for the future. Used within a formal framework for business performance, scorecards enable executives to manage strategy effectively and help management teams understand the relationships among business metrics. They also improve visibility into the ways in which performance in one area (for example, R&D) affects outcomes in another (for example, Sales). These relationships are often visualized through a strategy map.

A Balanced Scorecard is one type of business scorecarding methodology that's used to measure a company's business performance against strategic goals and determine whether its business operations are linked and aligned with its objectives, vision and strategy. When a Balanced Scorecard methodology is used in conjunction with business analytics, it's possible to drive strategic decision-making across the enterprise.

In fact, in a recent Palladium Group survey of IBM clients, nearly two-thirds of those who reported breakthrough performance results, such as increases in revenue or positive shareholder returns, employed a Balanced Scorecard approach coupled with business analytics. A business performance strategy based on these elements can help a company's leaders better link strategy to operations and ultimately achieve the kind of breakthrough business performance they're looking for.

At the tactical level, employees and managers use scorecards to monitor performance against targets for discrete, specific projects. At the strategic level, scorecards are an integral part of a corporatewide business performance management system that executives use to map corporate strategy and communicate it throughout the organization. Executives who use scorecarding at this strategic level can better align decisions and tactics with overall goals based on their ability to access relevant information from all data sources to capture a view of the business across units, operating subsidiaries, and geographic regions.