What's the difference between a scorecard and a dashboard? Seems to me that the terms are used interchangably.

asked Apr 05 '10 at 18:44

Jason's gravatar image


This is something that I'd really like to see some more clarification on, too. It's a question that gets asked a lot around my organization, as I'm trying to encourage use of the Balanced Scorecard but everyone just pushes me towards dashboard type solutions.

(Apr 06 '10 at 12:45) John Jones

My relatively simple answer to this is that scorecards are used for strategy and dashboards are used for operations. So, the two can live together nicely. You could have a strategy scorecard which shows how you're doing on big picture things, then drill down into a dashboard to see the operational drivers. Also, scorecards, IIRC, have more qualitative and subjective data (less frequently) while dashboards show more real time data and have less analysis next to the data items.

answered Apr 06 '10 at 22:32

Arkady%20Ozeman's gravatar image

Arkady Ozeman

Arkady, I agree with your simple answer. I think you also see in scorecards the idea of strategic objectives with measures associated. The strategy information may not be readily available or only measured on a monthly or quarterly basis. There may not initially be targets or comparable benchmarks.

For dashboards, they tend to be measure or KPI focused, and they can have weekly, monthly, or more frequent information. They are operations focused, and many times, the measures are about keeping information within a threshold, so no activity is required unless your results fall below a threshold (like a monitoring system). Ted

answered Apr 15 '10 at 22:41

Ted%20Jackson's gravatar image

Ted Jackson

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