Scorecards and dashboards provide "at-a-glance" information about business performance across the enterprise. They are typically generated for managers and executives who need an overall view of business performance and find tremendous value in viewing timely, visually intuitive snapshots of strategic financial and operational data.

Scorecards are similar to Dashboards in a way that it provides easy-to-understand, summarized, at-a-glance data for the managers and top officials to tell them about their company's present and past performance. Scorecards thus help to monitor the Key Performance Indicators accurately and to communicate the goals and strategies across the organization in an efficient and elegant manner. In a Business Intelligence environment, Scorecards allows managers to set metrics or targets and monitor them to see their impact on every department.

Balanced Scorecards

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

The underlying rationale is that organizations cannot directly influence financial outcomes, as these are "lag" measures, and that the use of financial measures alone to inform the strategic control of the firm is unwise. Organizations should instead also measure those areas where direct management intervention is possible. In so doing, the early versions of the Balanced Scorecard helped organizations achieve a degree of "balance" in selection of performance measures. In practice, early Scorecards achieved this balance by encouraging managers to select measures from three additional categories or perspectives: "Customer," "Internal Business Processes" and "Learning and Growth."

History of balanced scorecard(BSC)

The first balanced scorecard was created by Art Schneiderman (an independent consultant on the management of processes) in 1987 at Analog Devices, a mid-sized semiconductor company. Other early applications of the concept in various companies were conducted by Harvard professor Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and others in a Nolan-Norton Institute study group. In 1992, Kaplan and David P. Norton began reporting the findings of their initial balanced scorecard experience through a series of journal articles. In 1996, they published a seminal book The Balanced Scorecard