Chapter 19. Balanced Scorecard

Over the course of this book, we learned how to analyze business data through various perspectives. We started with the sales perspective and then went on to develop visualizations for financial, marketing, working capital, operations, and human resources perspectives. Then we brought several perspectives together in a fact sheet that analyzed a customer through a sales representative's point of view.

Our next step is to unite the most pertinent perspectives and analyze the business as a whole from a business owner's point of view. This result is often referred to as the company's information dashboard. Stephen Few was the first person to investigate the real purpose of the information dashboard in his book, Information Dashboard Design, and he defines dashboards as follows:

A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored...