The Business:
Serving three million people in thirty-four cities, the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) is the county’s primary transportation agency with more than 2000 employees. OCTA’s Information Systems (IS) department supports all the technology needs of the agency.
The Challenge: Beginning 2003, the IS management was finding it difficult to effectively prioritize work, allocate resources, negotiate budgets, motivate staff and define appropriate performance metrics. The department made several strategic changes, yet there was little consensus on their effectiveness. Despite the existing five year Information Technology strategic plan and the annual planning effort, the IS management felt that the department was not adequately aligned with the rest of the OCTA organization. There was a need to revisit and validate the IS vision, mission, and strategy. The critical issue was - How do you translate an Information Systems’ strategy into actionable objectives at all levels and gain greater visibility into organizational performance?
The Vision: Align stakeholders, sponsors, leaders, and employees towards organizational development. Develop a framework to translate divisional strategy into operational terms for all employees such that strategy execution is everyone’s job. Ensure that employees understand these operational terms and align employee goals with organizational goals. Create a common context for management and staff to prioritize, allocate resources and make day-to-day decisions.
The Solution: A Balanced Scorecard (BSC) based performance management solution was provided adopting a four step business process – Strategize, Plan, Monitor, and Adjust/act. Existing strategic plans, vision, and mission statements were reviewed and refined as needed. An IS Strategy Map was developed with strategic themes along four diverse dimensions: Customer, Internal Processes, Financial, Employee Learning and Growth. Defined linked-in strategic objectives and mapped them against current and future initiatives.
Through a series of workshops with the BSC Core Team and management in attendance, performance measures for key IS functions were developed. Prioritized the key measures for the initial phase, set targets, thresholds, and identified owner for each measure. Involving employees at various levels, further defined data sources for each measure, data definitions, data collection process, data storage, and archival.
Throughout the BSC journey, a series of training sessions were conducted to dispel the myths about scorecard, and raise awareness. A comprehensive communication plan was implemented to encourage employee buy-in, and maintain enthusiasm at all levels. A reporting plan was implemented identifying the target audience, communication frequency and delivery vehicles (email, posters, Intranet, news letters, town hall meetings, etc.).
The Results:
- Aligned IS and corporate strategies
- Brought focus on short-term and long-term objectives – Doing the Right Things for the Agency!!
- Prioritizing projects, services and allocating resources based on strategy.
- Measurement system is in place with timely and reliable information.
- Continual and accurate communication of results to stakeholders and employees.
- Common framework for staff and management to make day-to-day decisions.
|
