Balanced Scorecards

The ‘Balanced Scorecard’ links performance measures by looking at a business's strategic vision from four different perspectives: financial, customer, innovation and learning, and internal business processes. The Balanced Scorecard is a management tool that provides stakeholders with a comprehensive measure of how the organization is progressing towards the achievement of its strategic goals.

The balanced scorecard translates the organization's strategy into four perspectives, with a balance between the following:

•between internal and external measures

•between objective measures and subjective measures

•between performance results and the drivers of future results

You should use the balanced scorecard to assess and measure the performance of your organization by customizing the balanced scorecard as per whatever makes sense for your company. A balanced scorecard helps to provide a balanced performance management system to an organization. This is because a balanced scorecard takes into account both short-term and long-term views, which is outside the Sales & Marketing mindset.

The Balanced Scorecard was first introduced in the early 1990s through the work of Robert Kaplan and David Norton of the Harvard Business School. Since then, the concept has become well known and its various forms widely adopted across the world.

To aid clarity and utility, Kaplan and Norton proposed that the number of measures on a Balanced Scorecard should also be constrained in number, and clustered into four groups. Kaplan and Norton proposed that measure selection should focus on information relevant to the implementation of strategic plans, and that simple attitudinal questions be used to help determine the appropriate allocation of measures to perspectives (Kaplan and Norton, 1992).