Part 1: Write annotated summary of each article. Use APA throughout.

Our review starts with a research conducted by professors; Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
published in 1992. In their article, they presented a solution to the problem of the increasing
complexity of management measures. Moreover they exemplify this complexity comparing the
task of managing a company with the task of flying a plane; too many sources of information are
displayed to the pilots (or managers) and the relying on a single one would be fatally dangerous
(Kaplan & Norton, The Balanced Scorecard - Measures That Drive Performance, 1992). This would
explain why companies that rely only on financial measures to assess their goals mostly perceive a
failure environment.

To deal with this problem, they devised the innovative concept of balanced scorecards (BSC). This
tool is said in the paper to allow the manager to look at the business from all important
perspectives, namely; the customer, internal process, learning and growth, and financial. The
essence of the BSC is to ask how much the goals of the business are being accomplished according
to each of these four perspectives. The answers for these questions are the measures that senior
managers can evaluate.

A study concerning the implementation of the BSC in a semiconductors company is described

within the same article as well. Measures for customers’ perspective for this company were
classified into four categories: cost, performance and service, quality, and time. Surveys were the
most widespread used technique for measuring customer’s opinion. Factors regarding the
measures of internal processes of the company included cycle time, employee skills, productivity,
quality, and use of technology. Information Systems (IS) played a vital role in operations
measurement for the company (Kaplan & Norton, The Balanced Scorecard - Measures That Drive
Performance, 1992).

We make now a time skip with our next article review. Written by one of the authors of the first
article reviewed, this second article describes the roots behind the concept of Balanced Scorecards
and its development into a management tool that has been widely applied by thousands of
organizations around the world (Kaplan, 2009). The historical review of the article starts with the
origins of the BSC from a project proposed by General Electric staff in 1950 to develop
performance measurement. We can see many shared characteristics between the objectives of
the project and the essence of the BSC. The historical review follows through by mentioning some
of the theoretical concepts of management systems developed in the second half of the twentieth
century including the three levels of the management hierarchy. However, it is stated that the
financial measurement was still the main form of performance assessment and these ideas were
not successfully applied until the early 90s. Multiple study cases about the success achieved from
the combination of financial with non-financial information along this period of time were
mentioned in the paper.

The second part of the article emphasizes the development of the strategic approach of BSC. The
development of this approach emerges sonly after the first implementations of the BSC (Kaplan,
2009). Companies noticed that business metrics comes only after the strategy is well defined.
Hence, the application of BSC into strategic management is further described. Strategic objectives
and mapping are defined. The first refers to the specific goals the company expects to attain and
the latter links objectives from all four perspectives to represent their interdependence. Hence, a
generic strategy management system is formed. The development of this strategy management
system converted BSC into a powerful management tool, which companies may align to their own
strategies.

We can portrait a perfect example of the application of BSC as a management tool after our third
article review. In this article, the application of the BSC in the Performance Appraisal of the
Chinese Government organization is studied (Jiang & Liu, 2014). This article starts with a
description of the BSC and the benefits it can provide to organizations, the context of the balance
set for non-profit or government organizations described by Kaplan is also mentioned (Kaplan,
2009). Next, Government Performance evaluation is described along with the problems that the
actual management system of the Chinsese Government faces. Among these problems, we found
that the main problem was a lack of guidance in the performance evaluation system, leading to
very subjective and biased measures.

The next part of the article describes the setup of the BSC applied to the Chinese Gonvernment
management system. Within this context, focus on financial perspective is on administrative costs
and expenses, citizens satisacion is the main goal of customer perspective, employees training is
the primary objective on the learn and growth perspective, and effective administrative systems is
the ultimate goal from the internal process perspective. The result system is hereby named the
Appraisal System (Jiang & Liu, 2014). This appraisal system was further tested through statistical
methods like the Principal Component Analysis and Regression Analysis applied on answers from
an extense survey. The results showed a strongly correlated system ready to be implemented.

Our fourth and last article reviewed was the most recent of all. Published in 2017, this article
presents a research regarding the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard based on a
systematic literature review (Quesado et al, 2017). The systematic review starts with a description
of the benefits that organizations get after implementation of the BSC. Being helpful to
organization strategy and strategy alignment are portrayed as the main advantages of BSC. Next,
the article reviews the contributions of BSC to organizations, including better results and resurces
management.

Part 2: As an IT professional, discuss how you will use Balanced Scorecard to manage IT
resources efficiently.

As an IT professional, I would use Balanced Scorecards to improve the alignment between IT

systems and business strategy. For many companies, IT plays an important role for objectives
achieving from the internal process perspective, although it is not restricted to it. Hence, the use
of BSC can allow a better tracking of IT investments and results from all customer, internal process,
financial, and growth perspectives. An example taken from the internal process perspective would
be the assessment of the improvements in productivity and employee skills derived from the
investments on new IT infrastructure. Other example would be the development of a completely
 new IT strategy to expand business value to a bigger scale; this approach would correspond to the
growth perspective. One last example referring to the customer perspective would be the
development of a direct-to-customer sales service that includes the development of a functional
website.

References

Jiang, D., & Liu, Z. (2014). Research on Application of Balanced Scorecard in the Government Performance
Appraisal. Open Journal of Social Sciences , 91-96.

Kaplan, R. S. (2009). Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard. Handbooks of Management

Accounting Research , 1253-1269.

Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1992). The Balanced Scorecard - Measures That Drive Performance. Harvard
Business Review , 71-79.

Quesado, P., Aibar Guzmán, B., & Lima Rodrigues, L. (2017). Advantages and contributions in the Balanced
Scorecard implementation. Intangible Capital , 186-201.