Balance Score Card Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Balance Score Card - Essay Example 10). Niven highlights the importance of the BSC in allowing ‘an organisation to translate its mission into concrete objectives that align all employees (2006, p. 93).’ The Balanced Scorecard is a document that integrates the vision, mission and objectives of the organisation and provides a dashboard view of the status of the many initiatives being taken towards organisational goals. The initiatives are drilled down from a larger purpose based on financial performance and customer appreciation. Initiatives that seem to go off-course, can be brought back on track with this approach. This method allows the organisation to steer the course and make immediate changes to plans in the face of unforeseen business circumstances. The dashboard view allows the organisation to foresee chosen methods that need to change and enables immediate action. On the other hand, an organisation may devise plans to provide flexible schemes to attract different customer types. The cost versus flexibility advantage is continuously tracked and the customer is enabled to take an immediate decision regarding this strategic initiative. Drury (2004) points out that this approach provides a snapshot of four perspectives: the financial perspective brings out past performance while the customer perspective involves looking inward to understand the customer’s view of the company. The internal process perspective forces an external view of the impact of adopted processes and the learning and growth perspective provides a view to the future and the organisational capability in harnessing and progressing internal intelligence (p. 1005). This approach also provides the business with measures to gauge past performance and likely future performance. Lead measures should provide a prediction of lagging measures (Niven, 2006, p. 144). The combined use of these measures helps the