The Stra.Tech.Man Scorecard

Abstract

This article presents the “Stra.Tech.Man approach” (strategy-technology-management synthesis) as the basis for creating a “Stra.Tech.Man Scorecard,” which can be used for the strategic audit of every socio-economic organization. After reviewing the literature on strategic control and strategic audit, the study proceeds with a critical appraisal of Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard model and presents the theoretical foundations of the Stra.Tech.Man approach. It composes a first conceptual outline of the Stra.Tech.Man Scorecard, which can function as an integrated monitoring tool, exploring and describing the evolution of “physiologies” of the studied socio-economic organizations (firms). It concludes that the formal balanced scorecard approach: (a) has been applied mainly to larger and more sophisticated organizations, (b) does not offer a compound understanding of the central dimensions of strategy, technology, and management that can be linked in an integrated way to the financial results, (c) leaves relatively unspecified many critical aspects of a firm’s choices, especially in strategy articulation, technology selection, and management implementation, (d) does not create complete profiles for the firms’ evolutionary physiologies. In contrast, the Stra.Tech.Man Scorecard: (i) does not have as a prerequisite any pre-existing systematic performance measurement framework in the organization and, therefore, it is not limited by any firm size, type, or physiology, (ii) it links in an evolutionary way the “core” qualitative dimensions of strategy, technology and management (Stra.Tech.Man audit) with the quantitative financial results of the organization, (iii) it can and has been used as an integrated analysis instrument by taking into account more adequately the evolutionary dimensions of the meso-environment of organizations besides the micro-level of analysis which the balanced scorecard is primarily associated.