Scorecard Best Practices

Entertainment Subscription Company⁶

Background

The Entertainment Subscription Company (ESC) provides proprietary content (music, videos, live content) to its subscribers though hand‐held, mobile devices. This rapidly growing company has made large technology investments in many disparate systems. Its disparate systems have created an environment that they, themselves, describe as being “data rich and information poor.”

ESC is a young organization and hasn't developed an appreciation of the value of data and the need for consistent metric and data definitions. Within sections of the company, an entrepreneurial spirit and a tendency to be very protective of data and results have created a silo model that limits visibility throughout the organization.

As a consequence, the company's strategic initiatives are not universally understood and employees are unsure of their role in supporting the strategic plan.

Setting the Stage

To provide better focus on its operations, ESC had developed six strategic objectives. The objectives addressed improving customer insight, market understanding, and partner alliances that would ultimately lead to a highly profitable organization.

Recently, the new executive management team chose to drive the need for better visibility into the organization. From experience with a previous company, they had developed a positive impression of the use of scorecards and operational dashboards. They hoped that these analytical tools would take ESC's strategic objectives ...