Scorecards for Small Businesses
In the mid-1980s I worked for a small non-profit organization with an annual budget just under $250k. We worked hard as an organization to develop the equivalent of Scorecards as a way to track our goals and accomplishments as they applied to the purpose and intentions of the organization.
Because we didn’t have much more than a spreadsheet to manage information we had to keep things fairly simple. KPIs were broken down into 3 month, 1 year, and 5 year goals. We had to keep the goals simple as well, in order to be able differentiate them from purposes. A Goal is measurable, and has a time frame to complete. A purpose is something you would like to do, and is important; but there is no measurable time for completion, or definition of being done.
I can only imagine what we could do today in that same organization with the capabilities available in Azure. By not purchasing licenses for the complete software stack a small business could take full advantage of the entire Scorecard capability built into Microsoft BI on the Azure platform.
Perhaps that is the new consulting opportunity…assisting SMBs to build the framework for their own Scorecard targeted to their personal success. Tying it together with PowerPivot and a little training, an SMB could be taking advantage of technologies only available to those with a big bank account not many years ago.
Is this an area you may be considering as the role of the DBA is changing? Have you developed scorecards using modern BI tools? Share your experiences by writing btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
Featured White Paper(s)
How to Use SQL Server’s Extended Events and Notifications to Proactively Resolve Performance Issues
read more)
Featured Script
Audit – Which tables have Primary Keys
List of every table and if it has a Primary Key or not… (read more)