Faced with tough performance imperatives across all aspects of its operations, General Motors Europe has developed and cascaded a balanced scorecard process through eight business units and 12 functions. Martin Shotbolt, leader of GME’s Information Systems and Services Change Management Team explains: “Overall, scorecard adoption has strengthened strategic performance management because it has helped all operating units across GME to focus on and understand how their performance and capabilities impact on business strategy.”

Since the early 1990s Armstrong World Industries Building Products Operations (BPO) has consciously developed its high performance capabilities to sustain worldwide market leadership and push its industry’s competitive standards higher. A critical contributor to success has been the re-orienting of strategic planning, priorities and management in order to drive the corporate goal of value creation for employees, customers and shareholders.

Inktomi, a global player in developing software to support the Internet’s infrastructure, with applications including search engines, caching and e-commerce, has run hard and fast. It is tomorrow’s high performance organization now, being built on agility, rapid growth and innovation. Critical contributors to Inktomi’s success include an unwavering focus on strategic priorities, disciplined management and alignment of the whole organization with the company’s vision, culture and technological capabilities.

At Cisco Systems Inc, a worldwide leader in Internet infrastructure, the quality of leadership is a critical success factor in enabling the organization to tackle current business challenges in addition to those as yet unseen opportunities. Stephen Thoma, Leadership and People Development Manager at Cisco Systems Europe, Middle East and Africa, emphasises this: “Our continuing mission is to incubate all the passion and principles of leadership we have developed so they can be incubated in every level of the organization as an implicit way of doing things. If we were to lose these ‘baked-in’ qualities and the capacity to reinvent ourselves, frankly we’d lose everything.”

Aligning the organization with changing circumstances, priorities and objectives has enabled NatWest Insurance Services to become a leader in the UK insurance industry. “We have become especially successful at ensuring everybody in the organization understands what their contribution is to what the business has to achieve. There is direct alignment between strategy, corporate goals, business unit objectives and team or individual targets,” says Bob Taylor, Director of Operations. Alignment has been secured by deploying a balanced business scorecard as the strategic management framework, supported by the company’s own version of Business Excellence.

UK information services provider Yellow Pages admits to having an obsession with performance improvement to benefit its business and residential customers. This and its allied deployment of the EFQM Excellence Model over seven years culminated in a European Quality Prize in 1998 followed by winning the 1999 European Quality Award for the large business category.

Lucent Technologies’ Global Financial Services organization is establishing itself as a world-class shared service operation and a strategic business partner to the corporation. Its goal is to add value to executive decision-making at least cost. Key enablers have been process improvement and implementing balanced scorecards for each core process.

UK-headquartered BT aims to be the most successful global telecommunications group. Key to achieving this has been the building of joint ventures under the direction of the recently formed BT Worldwide division. A wealth of experience of using the balanced scorecard and other approaches to performance management, such as TQM and the Business Excellence model, has proven invaluable in creating performance management and measurement frameworks for its joint ventures.

Policy deployment at Xerox Europe gives the organization its direction and basis for managing the enterprise. It links corporate vision, industry challenges, priorities, business direction, strategy, goals and team/individual contribution. Stephen Cronin, Executive Director Group Resource, says: “The Xerox Management Model and policy deployment are enablers for people, work teams and managers. Together they provide a closed loop process which we like to call balanced engagement.”