Best Practices Score Card: The Self Realization

This blog post centers around creating a business case about “Best Practices Score Card (BPSC): The Self-Realization”, to customize the offering to your clients and create a “Blue Ocean” for your organization, and towards the end, this score card will help you identify the phased approach to gather relevant information from different places.

The BPSC is about comparing ‘an apple with another apple’. As an analogy, best practices is about comparing an Apple with another Apple, which have the same color, size, weight, texture, same types and equal number of seeds, same DNA, same shelf life, and, same taste. It’s about comparing an Apple with another Apple which, when churned through a Food Processor would result in to equal amount of juice, and when their pulp got processed through a Pulp Extractor, would essentially result in to equivalent type of Apple Tart sauce which have the same texture.

Sounds interesting and yummy, then please read on!

The fallout from one of the recent work on benchmarking study, provided us with enough evidence to say that the granularity of their offering is may be falling short of the deepest and most pertinent requirement of their client.

This clarity in both, your thought process and your service offering, can happen when you concentrate your efforts towards understanding not just the different sectors, but also, the various companies (within these verticals). This way you will also be able to focus your efforts on the various functions, processes, sub-processes, and their relative cost, revenue, and return on investment (RoI) on IT, marketing, sales, operations and production, finance, learning, thought leadership initiatives, and so on.

For instance, the metric of ‘IT Spend’ can fall in the category of financial benchmarking, as also in, process benchmarking, and similarly this metric means different thing to different industry vertical. Although, this metric should be unique, in the sense, that it should fall in only one category and should mean the same thing to all the verticals, and it should talk in terms of return on IT investment, generated out of IT revenue only.

According to me, we must invest our effort to create a BPSC, which will consist of five different perspectives (using the parlance from BSC):

1.Learning and Growth Perspective,

2.Customer Perspective,

3.Financial Perspective,

4.Internal Business Process Perspective, and

5.Accountability Perspective (this is a new one)

All of these five perspectives will have four common PARAMETERS:

a)Objective

b)Measurement

c)Target

d)Initiative

The BPSC will enable you to:

1.Gather as much intelligence about the various company types drilled down to their different functions, processes, sub-processes, IT budget and revenue (every quarter, every half-year, or every annum), and RoI (IT) (in other words, RoI as a function of IT).

2.Ask pointed questions to the business stakeholders, which will enable you to solve their deepest and most pertinent requirement. (When you are only interested in What’s, Why’s, How’s, and not the other opening statements for querying. The other query statements are typically taken care of by the likes of various analyst organizations.)

3.Enable you to customize your offering, beforehand, vis-à-vis your practice areas in different geographies, and the other business divisions responsible for the IT implementation, for instance, applications, solutions, infrastructure, and so on. This will also provide scope for these divisions to generate repeat businesses.

Help me to create a “Best Practices Score Card: ‘The Self Realization’” business case addressing each of these areas to enable you to be able to justify your effort, cost, and gather a lot of information about the clients operating in various geographies, enable your business organization to buy relevant reports and extract information from these reports. Overall, the objective is to create “diverse learning opportunities within your organization and focused client engagements.”

Please post your comments based on your understanding and exposure to the real business environment and the business requirements.