Grégory Wegmann

The Balanced Scorecard as a Knowledge Management Tool: A French Experience in a Semi-Public Insurance Company

In this paper we present the Balanced Scorecard, a Strategic Control tool, which is quite famous all around the world and in the European countries. Its principle objective is to articulate planning decisions with control ones thanks to non-financial indicators. The Strategic Control and the Agency Theories constitute the foundation of this tool. But in Northern Europe, some specific Balanced Scorecard have been designed in the framework of the Knowledge Management Theory. To work, the Balanced Scorecard needs a sophisticated information system support. Using two theoretical backgrounds, the Strategic Control approach and the Knowledge Management Theory, we analyse the relevance of the Balanced Scorecard. More particularly, we present the French situation. First, we show that the French managers believe that the Balanced Scorecard is a relevant management instrument to drive the firms objectives. Second, we describe the Balanced Scorecard of a semipublic French insurance company.

Non-Financial Indicators and Strategic Management Accounting

For Anthony (1965, p. 17), management control is ‘the set of accounting and financial verification tools based on predefined objectives’; in other words, a verification planning process. The conventional approach to management accounting discloses a tension among the processes of strategic management, management control and operational control. Johnson and Kaplan (1987) explain that coordination between these processes is difficult to obtain. The Strategic Management Accounting (now SMA) stream is a concept and set of practices that tries to solve this difficulty of coordination. It emerged during the 1970s and has been developed since (Schendel and Hofer, 1979; Horovitz, 1979). There has been a growing amount of research on this subject since the mid-1980s. The impact of Johnson and Kaplan’s 1987 work Relevance Lost on management accounting tools is significant.