Users employ dashboards to measure and understand what is happening in the business right now within a context that is relevant to them. To help build the context, these information workers can define and manipulate information pulled from a variety of sources into a single visual representation of performance trends. Dashboards are often used to alert workers to exceptional and unexpected performance results, and users can analyze business drivers and trends – though not causality – from the dashboard application. Given their relatively low barrier to entry in terms of both price and ease of deployment, dashboards are more readily adopted than scorecards.

Scorecards, on the other hand, are used to see beyond what is happening throughout the organization into the cause-and-effect relationships between performance and strategy to help define what must happen next. Scorecard applications also enable an organization’s strategists to work together in defining and managing business strategy and action, and then communicate strategy and goals across the enterprise. Scorecards are a greater undertaking than dashboard solutions, and not only because they are often more expensive to acquire and implement. The deployment of a scorecard solution requires a deeper understanding of the organization’s needs and KPIs from the beginning to achieve the full business benefits. For organizations already using dashboards, most scorecard solutions are not an easy addition to these existing deployments due to lack of integration. As a result, the implementation of scorecards represents a completely new project rather than a growth strategy that ultimately yields a comprehensive performance management solution.”

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