The Use of Balanced Scorecard as a Tool for Performance Management and Planning

Abstract

For the past few decades, business management traditional approaches were considered as a systematic, top-down process based on the notion that the top management manages, leads, organizes, and controls the organization’s members and its resources in order to achieve its objectives. By early 1990s it was obvious that the traditional planning approaches were very complicated, too much time consuming, and cannot match the speedy pace of business changes. Meanwhile, organizations worldwide transformed towards competition that is based on information and capabilities to use and manage intangible assets more than its capabilities to invest in and manage physical assets, deem it necessary to set strategic guidelines and performance targets on all levels (organization, unit, department, section, and individual), and need to overcome the deficiency in the traditional management system in linking the organization’s long-term strategy with its short-term actions which caused a gap between the strategy and its implementation. Consequently, it was necessary to come up with a new concept, that is the Balance Scorecard (B SC), to match such development and changes, and create new approaches of strategic thinking that can be initiated and developed in any place and at any time in the organization. This paper focuses on this scorecard and its use as a tool for planning and performance management.

Keywords: balanced scorecard (B SC), performance, management, planning, perspectives, Kaplan and Norton