KPIs shall reflect business strategy and positioning. If you position your business for an elite client, you will prioritize certain KPIs like, for example, client status or satisfaction. If, on the other side, you position your company for mass consumers, other KPIs like price over competition will take precedence.

Strategy maps were originally conceived and used to visually represent business strategy, and are usually bound to Balanced Scorecard approach.

What if you do not use the Balanced Scorecard approach? What if you need a simpler way to design a small number of KPIs for your department?

As an alternative tool I suggest Mind Maps. I have seen them replace Strategy Maps in many cases with several advantages:

• Are easy to understand

• Are quick to plot and update

• Permit high complexity & detail (down up to KPI level)

• Are supported by many computer applications

• Are not bound to a particular method

• Convey thinking in a top-down fashion

• Intuitively represent cause-effect relationships

• Can be exported to multiple formats (text and graphics)

• Can interface other applications (for example KPIStudio)

To illustrate this let me present two Mind Maps. Both were produced with FreeMind (an excellent free tool available on the Net).

First map is an example of a Strategy Map from classic Kaplan & Norton book spanning multiple pages (starting at page 111):

Second example is a simpler example for a small company where each KPI bound to objectives is identified with a flag: