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The successful management of an organization depends on two fundamental ingredients, the strategy and the operations that realize that strategy. Both of them are essential for a company to succeed. The strategy deals with specifying clearly the organization´s objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objectives together with allocating the necessary resources to implement the defined plans. Operations include all the process involved directly or indirectly in the production of goods or services. An efficient and effective process is essential for an organization to succeed especially when managing scarce resources in a highly competitive world, where customers constantly demand higher quality goods or services for a lower price tag. The scope of this book is to find out how an organization can realize that it is losing alignment before it is too late and take corrective actions that will have a long lasting effect. As a tool to help us achieve this goal, we will make use of the Balanced Scorecard in order to evaluate the methodology we are proposing.

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Prof Alexiei Dingli is the Head of the Intelligent Computer Systems Department within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. His work was rated world class and also won various awards. He is also the Mayor of Valletta, the Capital City of Malta. Under his tenure, the city flourished and will host the European Capital of Culture in 2018.

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