What is the Balanced Scorecard?

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is an organizational framework and tool for describing, implementing, and managing strategy at all levels of an enterprise by linking objectives, initiatives, and measures to an organization’s strategy. The scorecard provides an enterprise view of an organization's overall performance by integrating financial measures with other key performance indicators around customer perspectives, internal business processes, and organizational growth, learning, and innovation.

Since the concept was introduced by Professor Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton in 1992, BSCs have been implemented at corporate, strategic business unit, shared service functions, and even individual levels at hundreds of organizations—in both the private and public sectors—worldwide. The BSC has been the subject of three articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), more than 100 additional articles in business publications, a best-selling business book (now in 18 languages), numerous Harvard Business School case studies, and public conferences around the globe.

The BSC was selected by HBR as one of the most important management practices of the past 75 years. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business intelligence software vendors are releasing an ever-growing number of BSC applications and automated tools that support the implementation of BSC programs. Bain & Company’s latest survey of CEO management tools and techniques, published in 1999, shows strong satisfaction among BSC users, and Gartner Group predicts that by the year 2000, at least 40% of the Fortune 1000 will have implemented a Balanced Scorecard.