2007 Awards for Excellence

Citation

(2007), "2007 Awards for Excellence", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 11 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2007.26711daa.005

2007 Awards for Excellence

The following article was selected for this year's Outstanding Paper Award for Measuring Business Excellence

Viewing the balanced scorecard in a practical light

Wei Kium TeohConsultant in ChinaHian Chye KohAssociate Professor and Dean, School of Business, SIM University, Singapore.

PurposeAs far back as the early 1950s, progressive companies, such as General Electric, Dupont and General Motors, have observed the need to substantiate financial measures with non-financial measures in evaluating business performance. The quality movement during the 1980s brought about refreshed enthusiasm and ideas on viewing quality measures in substantiating the use of traditional financial measures in order to better monitor performance in the increasingly competitive and global environment. As the corporate world moved into the information age, executives in the 1990s became increasingly concerned that traditional performance measurement systems simply failed to track performance in a timely, complete and effective manner. This, in turn, led to the conceptualization of various new management techniques, including the balanced scorecard (hereafter abbreviated as BSC).

The short historical review above shows that executives have been tracking multiple financial and non- financial measures prior to the conception of the BSC framework. Indeed, the fundamental ideas behind the BSC are not new. The packaging and labelling of such ideas, however, are innovative and have captured the attention of executives and researchers.

This article originally appeared in Volume 10 Number 2, 2006, pp. 65-76, of Measuring Business Excellence

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