Also known as metrics and KPIs, measures enable you to collect objective, quantifiable data or data that indicates progress toward a performance or strategy target. For example, if one strategic goal is improved product quality, you could create measures called “number of product returns” or “poor customer satisfaction”. These measures would reflect product quality by identifying the number of product returns and dissatisfied customers. Measures enable you to perform these tasks:
Categorize and interpret business data. Use measures to reflect the health of key areas (perspectives), in your organization such as finance. For example, a measure that tracks the return on assets for an organization in the banking industry provides financial data and should be associated with the financial perspective.
Create scorecards to evaluate and represent the performance of strategy elements, accountability elements and employees.
Assign employees to measures to have them perform specific tasks such as enter results or establish target values. You can associate measures with the domain, such as a department, in which they are used to partition data in your application.