Dashboards versus Scorecards

There have been ongoing discussions about the difference between scorecards and dashboards.

In the book Drive Business Performance the authors refer to Wayne Eckerson (Deploying Dashboards and Scorecards, July 2006) with a nice overview.

	Dashboard	Scorecard
Purpose	Measures performance	Charts progress
Users	Managers, staff	Executives, managers, staff
Updates	Real-time to right time	Periodic snapshots
Data	Events	Summaries
Top-level display	Charts and tables	Symbols and icons

Is it important to differentiate? Not really, both present a structured view of the goals and objectives for the organization. Key is to drive efficiency and help them focus on what matters.