The Development of an Appropriate Strategy Map : An application of strategy map theory on China Mobile

Sammanfattning: After several years practice and research, companies and researchers have agreed thatmanagement of a company can not only rely on financial performance measures, butnon-financial measures should be also included in the set of tools. One of the mostpopular approaches to solve this problem are BSC (Balanced Scorecard) combiningwith KPI (Key Performance Indicators).Balanced Scorecard has been introduced by Kaplan and Norton in 1992 whichconsists of a set of financial and non-financial measures which are categorized in fourperspectives “financial”, “customer”, “internal processes”, and “learning and growth”.Key performance indicators are financial and non-financial metrics used to help acompany define and measure progress toward goals and KPIs are typically tied to anorganization's strategy through Balanced Scorecard.In this thesis we limit our study to the Mobile Network Operator industry, use casestudy, as the research design, with a combination of quantitative and qualitativeresearch methods. We summarized the limitation of the initial Balanced Scorecard,discussed the demand and benefits of strategy map, researched on principles andcriteria of a suitable strategy map. Ultimately, we formulated the process of how todesign a strategy map.In practice, after several years of dramatic development, along with the saturation ofthe market and the fierce competitions, mobile network industry stepped into the ageof depression; the sudden huge profits have been over. While a new wirelesstechnology, 3G offers the mobile network operators (MNOs) a new chance toimprove their value added services with high speed bandwidth from 3G technology,and make more profit from it. European 3G markets is the most competitive anddeveloped now, while the Japan 3G was already in an advanced level. In the recentyears, China as the biggest developing country also wants to start the 3G market.With the defined KPIs, we benchmarked the performance of China Mobile to thethree world’s leading MNOs, Vodafone, “3”, and NTT; ascertained the situation ofChina Mobile, set goals and discovered the cause-effect linkage of the KPIs, andfinally formulate a strategy map for China Mobile according to the analysis. Thestrategy map is based on four perspectives, financial, customers, internal and learningand innovation perspectives, and in each perspective, practical solutions which arebased on their strengths and weaknesses are provided. With the help of this research,the company can trace their problems and find the solutions for them.