Balanced Scorecard

The four perspectives of balanced scorecard focus on different things. As Kaplan and Norton(1992) point out that balanced scorecard provides answers to four basic questions: 1. How do customers see us( customer perspective)? 2. What must we excel at ( internal process perspective)? 3. Can we continue to improve and create value (innovation perspective) ?4. How do we look to shareholders ( financial perspective)? Customer perspective of balanced scorecard evaluates the related information to customers , such as customer satisfaction, market shares . Internal process perspective “identifies those internal business processes that enable the firm to meet the expectations of the customers in the target markets and those of the shareholders” (Figge et al, 2002, p271). Innovation perspective describes the learning and growth situation in the organization , for example the goodwill , leadership and so on. The last perspective--- financial perspective shows the financial performance of the company by examine the financial reports and calculate many ratios .

　　What is the relationship between the four perspectives of BSC has become a heated topic for many researchers since the BSC came out, Kaplan and Norton(1992) use an example that a company use a daily financial report to improve quality. A manager in the company created an income statement, by analyzed the data, operators got powerful feedback and motivation and guided their quality and production efforts. This gives some indication for the probable cause-and-effect relationship between the financial measurement and non-financial measurement of BSC. Since then, many researchers support the idea that cause-and-effect principle is the central of the BSC.