Balanced Scorecard, Enterprise Dashboard, Management Portal, Executive KPIs – we’ve all seen business intelligence terms like these used in a haphazard, interchangeable manner. Confusion arises when the same syntax is used by both business intelligence generalists and specialists.

When a management consultant says “Balanced Scorecard”, he or she usually means it literally – that is, in reference to the perfomance measurement discipline introduced in 1992 by Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton, used to measure a company’s activities in terms of its impact on vision and strategy.

When a business manager uses the term “scorecard” (note the lower case!), he or she may mean it in more of a general case – that is, in reference to a KPI dashboard or other less formal performance measurement dashboard.

This casual usage of management tool terms such as scorecards, dashboards, portals, etc. can cause confusion for sure, but I always tell people to assume the most general defintion unless by the context you know the user to mean a specific methodology.

The reason why I bring this whole issue up is because of a recent discussion with a Dashboard Spy reader who was wondering about the differences between scorecards and dashboards. After referrring him to this post on the difference between an enterprise dashboard and a balanced scorecard, he sent me some scorecard graphics to post.

Here is a series of balanced scorecard screenshots. The underlying system is made by EnterpriseStrategyWare.

The dashboard screenshot above shows a focus on Shareholder Value metrics.

The dashboard above is a KPI by Measure, in this case, shareholder value.

Tags: Balanced Scorecard, Enterprise Dashboards

PS. No, George W. Bush does NOT read The Dashboard Spy. He does, however, wonder about business intelligence. I think.