Abstract

A story about a king and queen, their ministers and subjects, and a wise man demonstrate the importance of goals, objectives, strategic planning, and information management. The king is pleased with application of the wise man's plant-grow-check-act cycle to the production of maize. Yet, the royal couple feels they are too overwhelmed with data to know how successful the kingdom has been. When ministers on the Privy Council volunteer to collect data to measure success, the wise man warns them to present only an overview of their findings to the king. They do so, but the results still do not clarify how successful the kingdom is. The data-gathering efforts suffer from a lack of structure. Therefore, the wise man suggests a strategic planning process that will improve information management while aligning all in the kingdom with the desires of the royal couple. The planning process is structured by a pyramid. At the top is the vision of the king and queen. This is transformed into strategies, objectives, critical success factors, key processes, and process measures. The goals and objectives spread throughout the kingdom. The subjects collect data for the process measures that are linked back to key processes, critical success factors, and objectives. The reporting of these data to the king and queen thus becomes manageable and directly aligned to their vision. To manage the measuring system, the wise man devises a balanced scorecard in which measurement categories are linked to the very questions the royal couple ask about performance trends.