Abstract: Through 1980s, management accounting researchers
described the increasing irrelevance of traditional control and
performance measurement systems. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC)
is a critical business tool for a lot of organizations. It is a
performance measurement system which translates mission and
strategy into objectives. Strategy map approach is a development
variant of BSC in which some necessary causal relations must be
established. To recognize these relations, experts usually use
experience. It is also possible to utilize regression for the same
purpose. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), which is one of the
most powerful methods of multivariate data analysis, obtains more
appropriate results than traditional methods such as regression. In the
present paper, we propose SEM for the first time to identify the
relations between objectives in the strategy map, and a test to
measure the importance of relations. In SEM, factor analysis and test
of hypotheses are done in the same analysis. SEM is known to be
better than other techniques at supporting analysis and reporting. Our
approach provides a framework which permits the experts to design
the strategy map by applying a comprehensive and scientific method
together with their experience. Therefore this scheme is a more
reliable method in comparison with the previously established
methods.