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Chapter 20 Organizing for improvement 609
Figure 20.6 The measures used in the balanced scorecard
As well as including financial measures of performance, in the same way as traditional performance
measurement systems, the balanced scorecard approach, also attempts to provide
the important information that is required to allow the overall strategy of an organization to
be reflected adequately in specific performance measures. In addition to financial measures
of performance, it also includes more operational measures of customer satisfaction, internal
processes, innovation and other improvement activities. In doing so it measures the
factors behind financial performance which are seen as the key drivers of future financial
success. In particular, it is argued that a balanced range of measures enables managers to
address the following questions (see Figure 20.6).
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How do we look to our shareholders (financial perspective)?
What must we excel at (internal process perspective)?
How do our customers see us (the customer perspective)?
How can we continue to improve and build capabilities (the learning and growth perspective)?
The balanced scorecard attempts to bring together the elements that reflect a business’s
strategic position, including product or service quality measures, product and service development
times, customer complaints, labour productivity, and so on. At the same time it attempts
to avoid performance reporting becoming unwieldy by restricting the number of measures
and focusing especially on those seen to be essential. The advantages of the approach are that
it presents an overall picture of the organization’s performance in a single report, and by
being comprehensive in the measures of performance it uses, encourages companies to
take decisions in the interests of the whole organization rather than sub-optimizing around
narrow measures. Developing a balanced scorecard is a complex process and is now the
subject of considerable debate. One of the key questions that have to be considered is how
specific measures of performance should be designed. Inadequately designed performance
measures can result in dysfunctional behaviour, so teams of managers are often used to
develop a scorecard which reflects their organization’s specific needs.
Setting target performance
A performance measure means relatively little until it is compared against some kind of
target. Knowing that only one document in five hundred is sent out to customers containing
an error, tells us relatively little unless we know whether this is better or worse than we were