Business literature is full of management techniques aimed at improving a company’s performance, strategy design and employee engagement. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is one of those techniques, and one that has considerably gained most of the attention since it was first introduced in 1992 by Dr. Robert S Kaplan and David P. Norton after a joint research. In the document, they suggested that a business should be studied using four perspectives: customer’s perspective, internal business perspective, innovation and learning perspective, and of course, the financial perspective, which is any company’s ultimate goal. The purpose is that managers should manage, ideally, three to five goals in each perspective and then have specific measures for those goals. The scorecard could then help managers simplify the organization’s vision and translate that vision into measurable actions that employees can understand and follow accordingly.
The Balanced Scorecard is basically a performance analysis technique, designed for the ultimate purpose of translating an organization’s overall business strategy into specific, quantifiable goals and to monitor the organization’s performance with respect to achieving those goals. It provides, like the name states, a balance of financial and non-financial measures that focus on both short and long term performance.
This document seeks to explain the BSC methodology and provide some evidence of its use in companies worldwide. It is also complemented with personal experience with the tool at a corporation in El Salvador.
Research shows that companies that have implemented the BSC have seen significant improvements in their results. These results are not due solely to the BSC implementation, but they are evidence that the BSC can be an effective tool to help organizations achieve their strategic goals more easily if implemented correctly.

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