Ultimately, your measures should help to communicate the organization's strategies and goals, motivate actions to these, and provide guidance and feedback to their attainment. Thus, for an organization to reap full potential of the balanced scorecard process, it needs to first define its mission, determine major departmental objectives, and select strategies. A faculty committee at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education recently adapted the BSC model to satisfy the central administration's need to know how the department is doing and how it measures up to other schools of education. One of their conclusions is that the processes through which people must work together in order to develop the scorecard will probably have latent benefits that contribute to organizational well being, like conversations that encourage the development of shared values. A properly constructed scorecard should tell the story of the business unit's strategy through such sequences of cause-and effect relationships between outcome measures and the performance drivers of those outcomes.
All balanced scorecards use certain generic measures, which tend to be core outcome measures.
Outcome measures without performance drivers do not communicate how the outcomes are to be achieved. A good balanced scorecard should have a mix of outcome measures and performance drivers. A wide variety of for-profit organizations have benefited from using the balanced scorecard but only a few applications by educational institutions have been reported to date. The Business Affairs division from the University of California at San Diego in 1993 implemented the most notable BSC success story in higher education. Reported benefits and outcomes have included the payroll department reducing errors 80 percent over a three-year period.