Balanced Scorecard - Criticism

Criticism

The Balanced Scorecard has always attracted criticism from a variety of sources. Most has come from the academic community, who dislike the empirical nature of the framework: Kaplan and Norton notoriously failed to include any citation of prior art in their initial papers on the topic. Some of this criticism focuses on technical flaws in the methods and design of the original Balanced Scorecard proposed by Kaplan and Norton, and has over time driven the evolution of the device through its various Generations. Other academics have simply focused on the lack of citation support. But a general weakness of this type of criticism is that it typically uses the 1st Generation Balanced Scorecard as its object: many of the flaws identified are addressed in other works published since the original Kaplan & Norton works in the early 1990s.

Another criticism, usually from pundits and consultants, is that the Balanced Scorecard does not provide a bottom line score or a unified view with clear recommendations: it is simply a list of metrics. These critics usually include in their criticism suggestions about how the 'unanswered' question postulated could be answered. Typically, however, the unanswered question relates to things outside the scope of Balanced Scorecard itself (such as developing strategies).

There are few empirical studies linking the use of Balanced Scorecards to better decision making or improved financial performance of companies, but some work has been done in these areas. However, broadcast surveys of usage have difficulties in this respect, due to the wide variations in definition of 'what a Balanced Scorecard is' noted above (making it hard to work out in a survey if you are comparing like with like). Single organization case studies suffer from the 'lack of a control' issue common to any study of organizational change - you don't know what the organization would have achieved if the change had not been made, so it is difficult to attribute changes observed over time to a single intervention (such as introducing a Balanced Scorecard). However, such studies as have been done have typically found Balanced Scorecard to be useful.