In the world of Performance Management, these two terms are often confused and sometimes used interchangeably. Although they both aggregate data across business units and give the reader the opportunity to monitor performance, there are important distinctions to be noted between Scorecards and Dashboards.
For the report Performance Management in 2012, The KPI Institute conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners, academics and consultants, who offered rich insights into the state of Performance Management as a discipline.
Ahmed Samy, Director – Corporate Strategy Office at Western Region Municipality, Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) was one of the practitioners that The KPI Institute interviewed.
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” (Lord Kelvin)
The Balanced Scorecard, or BSC, is a strategy performance management tool that helps managers to put in balance four main perspectives (the customer’s perspective, the company’s internal perspective, as well as innovation and improvement). Also, it encourages them to focus on complex cause and effect relationships and on developing a systemic aligned strategy.
Who sustains this? The Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), a wholly-owned company of the Government of Dubai, which develops downstream and upstream activities in the oil and gas sector. Saeed Khoory, Chief Executive Officer at ENOC, asserts that “ENOC’s name will become synonymous with industry best practices across multiple industries and markets.” How is this going to happen? Through the right performance management approach.
When Kaplan and Norton’s second book, The Strategy Focused Organization was published, the Harvard Business Review hailed the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as one of the most significant contributions to management practice in the last 75 years. However, despite its well-publicized successes, many organizations that adopt a scorecard still fail to achieve the rewards they expect.