Balanced Value Impact Model

Balanced Scorecard approach

The Balanced Scorecard is useful for this purpose as a performance measurement and guidance framework that fully engages with intangible value and strategic change. Robert Kaplan and David Norton originated the Balanced Scorecard as a response to the overwhelmingly financially weighted measures that dominated the annual reports of major corporations (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). As financial measures by their nature lag behind or look backwards at past performance, Kaplan and Norton suggest that such measures are becoming obsolete and do not reflect the full complexity of competitive organisational environments. Thus, they proposed the Balanced Scorecard, which, although initially developed to fit the needs of for-profit corporations, has found a wide range of applications in governmental, non-profit and – especially – memory institutions.

The Balanced Scorecard creates a holistic set of viewpoints on the central strategic focal point in order to deliver a framework of performance measurement. The use of perspectives is very beneficial for the richly context-driven work of impact assessment. By enabling four core ways of looking at and assessing any strategic opportunity or activity, the Balanced Scorecard provides a much-desired control and nuance to measurement.

The four perspectives in the Balanced Scorecard are financial, customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth. These perspectives are intended to balance each other, including the financial and non-financial; inward-looking processes and outward-facing customer satisfaction; current and future plans; or drivers towards performance and measures of success. These are usually represented in a graphic or tabular format to allow each to include sub-sections of objectives, means of measurement, targets and initiatives.

The Balanced Scorecard has much to offer, but there are problems in applying it without modification to the BVI Model. The language of the Balanced Scorecard is too corporate and either mystifying or excluding for those working in memory institutions. The four perspectives of the Scorecard are useful, but they provide focal points for measurement that do not align closely enough with practice in the cultural, media, academic or heritage sectors. Concepts of digital strategy and digital innovation are introduced in the BVI Model to allow for the framing of thinking provided by the Strategic Perspectives. The BVI Model therefore adopts aspects of the Balanced Scorecard framework, but with adaptations to align closely to the needs and expectations of practitioners from memory institutions.

Thus, to translate the Balanced Scorecard into the BVI Model,

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