A recent DSL ad touts the wonders of 256K Internet access. Web sites “fly by” … instead of staying on the screen, I guess. “Talk on the phone while you’re on-line,” … Miss Manners wouldn’t approve. And, it’s “nine times faster than a 28.8 modem,” as if 28.8 Kbps modems still set the standard. The name of this wondrous service? “MegaBit”.

Yes, Megabit apparently means 0.256 Mbps. The same committee (no one person can create stupidity of this caliber) will probably re-label T1 service as “Gigabit – the connection that runs 30 times faster than a 56K modem!”.

Innumeracy (the numerical equivalent of illiteracy as described in John Allen Paulos’s eponymous book) runs rampant, and despite heavy emphasis of finance and accounting in MBA programs, bad numbers are common in the executive suite, too.

Numerical problems found at the “C-level” (CEO, CFO, COO …) aren’t as egregious as an unbalanced checkbook. They’re more like driving a car whose dashboard includes only a speedometer and odometer.

We’re continuing with last week’s subject – creating an executive dashboard. The best-known method is the “balanced scorecard”, developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton (The Balanced Scorecard, Harvard Business School Publishing, 1996). Their balanced scorecard methodology turns a business’s strategic objectives into specific measures in four key dimensions: Financial, customer, process, and “learning and growth”.

The balanced scorecard methodology itself is fine. As with all methodologies, though, it tempts people to replace artistry with painting by numbers. Many CEOs, pressed for time and impatient with the difficulty of achieving executive consensus, will bypass the hard work of developing custom measures and instead adopt someone else’s because “we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.”

At the risk of straining automotive metaphors to their limits, I’ll respectfully point out that when you’re in the wheel business, you’d better reinvent the wheel … often. Since balanced scorecard measures are driven by (sorry) your company’s strategic objectives, you have to reinvent the wheel, or the whole exercise is pointless. No, it’s worse than pointless – having no measures simply means you’re ignorant, but having the wrong measures means you’re misinformed.

Time constraints in the executive suite are real, though, and executive consensus really is hard to achieve. And since as CIO your name is inextricably linked to the notion that huge investments in “information” will somehow lead to better decision-making, guess who’s going to get blamed when the balanced scorecard doesn’t deliver its promised results?

Here’s how you can turn this to your advantage: Offer to facilitate the process. You’re the logical candidate, because:

• Chances are good that IS employs the best mathematicians in the company. Poorly constructed formulas can wreck the best-conceived business metrics, and forcing executives to spend time fine-tuning equations will kill a project like this dead.
• The only business measures that work are those that are collected and reported automatically. We’re long past the age of manual data collection and tabulation. It will be IS that turns production databases and analytical data warehouses or marts into the dashboard measures once they’re developed.
• You run the intranet anyway, and that’s where the dashboard will go.
• And finally … in modern companies, IS should be all about the process of translating business vision to operational reality. Balanced scorecard implementations are just one more example.You own everything except the consensus itself, and by making that happen, you’ll elevate your own status in the bargain.

What’s not to like?