Balanced scorecard

The balanced scorecard, introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992, measures the execution of a strategy across four perspectives — financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth — so that financial results, which arrive late, are balanced by the indicators that anticipate them. Objectives in the four perspectives connect through cause-and-effect hypotheses drawn as a strategy map.

What separates a working scorecard from a quarterly slide is where its numbers come from. A scorecard filled in by hand, once a quarter, measures the diligence of whoever fills it. A scorecard computed as a view over live operational records — where each indicator is anchored to the process or entity it measures and can be drilled down to the records that produced it — measures the operation. The framework is the same; the difference is whether the scorecard reads the organization or the organization writes the scorecard.