Strategy Performance Management of IT Systems

Abstract

The realization of the strategy cannot be agreed if it is not measured. Building a measurement requires two things: understanding of the strategy and understanding of the measured information system. The strategy performance of the organization is often measured using the balanced scorecard. This research shows that balanced scorecard can also be used for measuring the strategy performance of an information system.

The research consisted of six phases: • Theoretical research • Selecting the framework for the research • Collecting information about the strategy • Analysing the interviews and forming the KPIs • Creating the automatic measurement dashboard • Analysing the initial results

The theoretical research discusses about strategy and measurement. It defines what the strategy is, what the measuring is, how strategical performance is measured and how IT is measured.

The information system balanced scorecard by Martinson, Davison and Tse was selected as the framework. However, it did not meet all the requirements. It was changed with two major alterations before it was used.

When this thesis work was started, there was very little useful material about the strategy of Santander Consumer Finance Oy. Therefore, it had to be collected by interviewing the top management. The interviews were transcribed. The transcriptions were coded, and a code-book was created. The most important quotations were copied to an excel sheet. The connec-tions between the quotations were recognized. The direct KPI suggestions from the interview-ees and the KPIs lead from the discussion were collected and analysed.

Finally, the selected KPIs were implemented using Microsoft PowerBI. The results show that Aplat is currently performing strategically very well. However, the KPIs showed, that there will be major problems with the future readiness. The created dashboard was working as expected.

This thesis work suggests future research for fitting the balanced scorecard framework working better with information systems. The alterations done in this thesis needs more reasoning. Also, the generalization of the automated measurement system serving many systems at the same time is a potential future research subject.