Balanced Scorecard Toolkit for Crisis Management

An effective management tool that empowers the managers at the time of crisis for better control is the Balanced Scorecards. All crises are unique and pose new threats to organizations hence it become mandatory to keep a track of the influences. Thus, organizations can use scorecards for detecting and studying the proceedings, methodologies, tasks and assigned activities in an unbiased manner while heading towards the set targets.

Loss of data can be fatal to any business entity. It is one of the most deadly and costliest assets to loose for any organization. Hence KPIs or Key performance indicators help in initiating measures to substantially prevent and curb the data loss costs by identifying and quantifying the key areas.

The data loss KPIs are categorized into four groups namely, data loss issues, human initiatives, technological initiatives and data and system management initiatives. The data loss issues are further identifies through indicators namely; human errors, technological failures, natural disasters and data and system management failures. This perspective indicates the percentage of data loss from different factors in an organization. Human initiatives are the measures taken by the management to efficiently prevent data loss errors of the employees. It constitutes of technological training sessions, motivational programs, percentage employees with authorized access and number of supervisory checks. The technological initiatives refer to procedures related to improving data security and handling. It comprises of backup programs, encryption, virus and spy ware detection and automated alert technology systems. Lastly, the data and system management initiatives include data integration, secondary storage, average time period for up gradation of systems and percentage of systems with verification password.

This is very helpful measuring the outcome of these factors in a particular time and plan and control methods for an organization’s future activities focusing on how these factors affect the entity. Balanced Scorecards help to prepare a full-fledge defensive strategy that combats businesses to wander away from their set objectives and fall into an emergency situation. It also helps to define the intangible factors, indicators or metrics which are based on simulators in a quantified form that is easy to comprehend and compare for the sake of extracting results.

The critical situations within an organization can be the result of numerous reasons. Data within an organization can be lost due to deliberate deletion of programs or files categorized as ‘intentional data loss’ or misplacement namely the ‘unintentional data loss’ or due to some disaster ranging from flood, fire to earthquake etc. or, due to corruption of files or software etc. which is classified as ‘data loss due to failure’ or finally the theft or crime data loss.

The reason to prevent data loss is the usefulness of the data to the organization and the misuse of that data by the competitors in the industry. Also it includes the costs involved in recreating the data and managing without it. Balanced Scorecards provide the appropriate solutions that can be utilized by organizations for minimizing data losses.