The Balanced Scorecard is here to stay (PDF)

“What you measure is what you get.” With this opening sentence Kaplan and Norton (1992: 71) introduce their concept of a balanced scorecard, which places corporate strategy in the heart of a performance measurement system. In accordance to Otley (1999: 364), the term “performance” in this paper shall mean the benefits to the stakeholders in question with respect to the context in which the term is used. Performance management refers to “management control systems [that] provide information that is intended to be useful to managers in performing their jobs and to assist organizations in developing and maintaining viable patterns of behaviour.” (Otley, ibid.)
The development of the balanced scorecard can be explained from different shortcomings of other performance measurement systems (Kaplan & Norton, 1992: 71). Traditional financial reporting systems provide an indication of how a firm has performed in the past, but offer little information about how it might perform in the future. These measures are severely impaired when trying to estimate the future results especially of intangible investments (Mouritsen, 1998; Mouritsen et al., 2001).
Companies usually do not employ a stakeholder-management concept for their strategic planning and when implementing strategy, managers rarely think of measurement as essential part of it (Kaplan & Norton, 1993: 134). A stringent communication and enforcement of strategy at lower corporate levels is rarely existent which may causes a gap between the intended strategy and actual behavior (Norreklit, 2000: 66). To deal with these problems, Kaplan and Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard framework which is depicted in figure