What is the strategy map? What constitutes the strategy map?

A strategy map is a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic goals being pursued by an organization.The Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard are based on the interrelation of four specific perspectives of your business: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth. The financial perspective describes the traditional strategic objectives in financial terms, such as return on investment, revenues, profitability and cost. The customer perspective defines the value proposition the organization intends to use to generate sales and loyalty from targeted customers. The internal process perspective identifies the critical few processes that create and deliver the customer value proposition. The learning and growth perspective identifies the human capital and organizational climate needed to support the internal processes. The Balanced Scorecard is developed through the Strategy Map. The edited client example below illustrates these interrelations.

In a typical strategic map, you basically relate strategic objectives with perspectives and strategic themes.  And then you plot dependency or cause and effect relationships between strategic objectives.  This gives a single screen view of how you objectives for learning and growth can support your objectives for operational excellence which can then help your customer objectives to finally help your financial objectives. 

If done properly, it can be a very wonderful representation of strategy execution.