{"id":1245,"date":"2015-01-22T18:06:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T23:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2016-02-19T13:56:59","modified_gmt":"2016-02-19T18:56:59","slug":"what-are-balanced-scorecards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/what-are-balanced-scorecards\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are Balanced Scorecards?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><em><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1246\" src=\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/balanced_scorecard.jpg\" alt=\"balanced_scorecard\" width=\"200\" height=\"217\" \/>Balanced Scorecards tell you the knowledge, skills and systems that your employees will need (learning and growth) to innovate and build the right strategic capabilities and efficiencies (internal processes) that deliver specific value to the market (customer) which will eventually lead to higher shareholder value (financial). &#8211;<\/em><\/span><em>&#8211; <\/em>Robert Kaplan &amp; David Norton<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In 1990, Art Schneiderman participated in a research study by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, and during this study described his work on Balanced Scorecards. Subsequently, Kaplan and Norton included anonymous details of this use of Balanced Scorecard in their 1992 article &#8220;<em>The Balanced Scorecard &#8211; Measures that Drive Performance,<\/em>&#8221; Harvard Business Review, February 1992.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">While traditional goal setting often focuses on financial, and thus lagging, measures, the Balanced Scorecard approach broadens the scope of indicators to include leading performance indicators from the following four key areas or perspectives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Financial<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">How do you want to look to your shareholders?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Indicators focus on whether your strategic and operational plan contributes to your top-line, bottom-line and\/or market share.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Customer<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">How do you want to look to your Customers?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Indicators focus on the specific measures that matter the most to your Customers.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Internal Business Processes<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">At which internal processes and capabilities do you want to excel?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Indicators focus on internal operations that enable Customer satisfaction, growth and profitability.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Learning and Growth<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">What skills and competencies do you need to implement your strategic and operational plan?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Indicators focus on your organization\u2019s ability to innovate, improve and execute.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Emphasizing these four key areas, the <a href=\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/browse\/business-document\/opex-balanced-scorecard-training-module-567\">Balanced Scorecard approach<\/a> not only monitors present performance (lagging indicators), but also leading indicators about how well the organization is positioned to perform and compete well in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic planning and performance management system that is used extensively in business, government, and nonprofit organizations to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Some of the benefits of utilizing Balanced Scorecards as part of the strategy development and deployment process are:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Help the management team focus on the execution of their business strategy.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Focus and align an organization towards common goals and objectives.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Enable an organization to understand the relationship between measures and performance.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Improve communication of organizational priorities across an organization.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Help employees to understand and focus on organizational priorities and realize relevant results.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Reduce the number of metrics to the few vital key performance indicators.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Strengthen and formalizing the project selection process to focus on key capabilities and enablers.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Operational Excellence Consulting uses a three phase approach to facilitate the effective development and deployment of\u00a0Balanced Scorecards and to ensure that the resulting scorecards adequately reflect an organization&#8217;s strategic initiatives, objectives and goals.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Please review our presentation material <a href=\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/browse\/business-document\/opex-balanced-scorecard-training-module-567\">Operational Excellence &#8211; Balanced Scorecard Deployment<\/a> for more details about Balanced Scorecards and how you can deploy them in your organization effectively.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Balanced Scorecards tell you the knowledge, skills and systems that your employees will need (learning and growth) to innovate and build the right strategic capabilities and efficiencies (internal processes) that deliver specific value to the market (customer) which will eventually lead to higher shareholder value (financial). &#8211;&#8211; Robert Kaplan &amp; David Norton In 1990, Art&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/what-are-balanced-scorecards\/\" rel=\"bookmark\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What Are Balanced Scorecards?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":1246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[82,85],"tags":[126,653,130,652,28],"class_list":["post-1245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-operations","category-organization","tag-balanced-scorecard","tag-david-norton","tag-kpi","tag-robert-kaplan","tag-strategic-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1245"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1286,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions\/1286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}