The Balanced Scorecard means different things to different people. Interpretations range from a dashboard of measures for a few executives, to an integrated strategic planning and mangement system for aligning organization strategy to operations, with transparent access to performance information by whoever needs it. 

The biggest difference among the balanced scorecard (BSC) and most other performance management systems is that the BSC (built as a strategic planning and mangement system) takes a holistic (organization-wide) view of performance, where as many of the other systems are more narrowly focused on a single or a few organization elements. For example, Six Sigma, Lean, and Total Quality Management systems tend to emphasize improvements to internal business processes; the Baldrige system focuses on many organization elements, but is used mostly for snapshot assessments periodically, not for strategically managing the organization day-to-day; and Logic Models are usually used to develop performance measures for outcomes, outputs, processes, and inputs related to programs and services. Exceptions abound, but the above generalities are what we have observed based on our experience in 17 countries. 

Unlike most of the other common performance frameworks, In the BSC, emphasis is placed equally on different dimensions (called Perspectives) of organizaiton planning and performance, including: Financial, Customer/Stakeholder, Internal Business Processes, and Organization Capacity. The result is an integrated system for planning and managing strategically.