A conference will present the results of research into sustainability and the balanced scorecard.
CIMA will be a network partner for international business school INSEAD's forthcoming conference on the balanced scorecard and sustainability. The conference will discuss a methodology to integrate environmental and social issues with financial control and strategic management decision-making. It represents the final milestone of a two-year research project championed by INSEAD.
Awareness of the dangers of making strategic business management decisions based strictly on the financial indicators generated by current accounting systems is ever increasing. This is one reason why strategic management tool, the balanced scorecard, continues to command the interest of many strategic managers in the public and private sector.
Part of the attraction of the balanced scorecard is its ability to help managers use successful strategies that consider the needs of different groups of stakeholders - not just the financial demands of shareholders.
Many public and not-for-profit organisations have, for example, devised and adopted their own versions of the original balanced scorecard that was devised by Kaplan and Norton. The original tool was developed to implement and manage strategies in which the needs of key and non-financial external stakeholders (including funding agencies, governance bodies, strategic partners, environmentalists, suppliers and the broader community) are incorporated.
Customised scorecards use strategy mapping to make explicit the cause and effect relationships in organisational activity. Where these relationships have been established and verified, and related predictive indicators have been identified, organisations can direct resources and effort towards activities that most affect the outcomes demanded by stakeholders.
The potential of the scorecard as a framework for integrating the concerns of environmental and sustainability managers with those of financial controllers has been the subject of much debate at INSEAD. On 20 November, the school will hold a conference entitled "A process for blending environmental and social strategies with financial control systems."
The research, which began in January 2002, involved three steps:
There will be keynote speeches from Robert Kaplan, one of the designers of the original balanced scorecard, and research leader Luk Wassenhove, the Henry Ford chaired professor of manufacturing at INSEAD; a presentation by INSEAD research coordinator, Francesco Zingales, on the problems of integrating environmental and sustainability issues into business strategy; and ACEA & Street Lighting Services, LVMH & Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and EDF & London Power Company will present users' evaluations of the methodology based on their own experiences.
Further details of the Conference, for which CIMA is a network partner, together with details of planned related research projects, can be found at the conference website
