Four perspectives of a Balanced scorecard

Each objective can be associated with one of the four perspectives a BSC-model consists of. Every perspective has its own characteristics and merits its optimal symbol or representation. The financial perspective has to do with the flow of money and hence a currency sign is more important here than for the other perspectives.

The innovation/learning perspective is related to objectives that want to achieve a higher degree of usable knowledge. Each of the perspectives can be represented by a metaphor that gives a clue about the meaning of the perspective. Financial: money, customer: people, internal: process and innovation/learning: knowledge.

The scorecard can be populate with standard measures

Furthermore, the four perspectives have regularly standard measures that make sense for each (business) organization. I suggest making a mapping from those abstract measures to concrete (interface) metaphors that are able to convey information. Measures in the customer perspective, which are related or similar to the standard measure ‘satisfaction’, can be for instance depicted as :-) (satisfied customers) and :-( (disappointed customers) in the business intelligence tool of one of the business intelligence vendors which support functionality for performance management and balanced scorecards.

Two states to express good or bad situations

The most important criteria for such metaphors are that they have at least two states which are able to express good or bad situations or directions.

Perspective	Measures / indicators
Financial	Return on Investment, revenue growth, profitability
Customer	Satisfaction, retention, market share, account share
Internal	Quality, response time, cost, workload, processing time
Learning/growth	Employee satisfaction, new product introductions, availability of modern technology

Table: The four perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard and some standard measures

Explanation of the four perspectives

Financial: how to achieve outstanding financial results based on excellent customer services, efficient internal processes and development of the organization and the skills of the employees. Here comes everything of the Balanced Scorecard together. Most KPIs of many organizations start measuring financial results which is not intentionally a bad thing.

Customer: how can we make our customers very happy and what do we have to do in order to achieve a high customer satisfaction. What dissatisfies our clients? What makes them really happy so they are willing to appraise our company. What is the Net Promotor Score (NPS) of your company?

Internal processes: what makes our business processes lean? what can you do about waist and what measures should be taken to reduce processing times? How to align all the company processes in order to make customers happy.

Learning / growth: this perspective is about creating an analytical company culture that is focused on data driven continuous improvement (Six Sigma). It is also about developing the right analytical skills and behavioral competences.