The concept of scorecards and dashboards has become increasingly popular as organizations discovered their ability to communicate complex information. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are important distinctions between a scorecard and a dashboard.
While both scorecards and dashboards display performance information, a scorecard is a more prescriptive format; a true scorecard usually includes components such as perspectives (groupings of high-level strategic areas), objectives (verb-noun phrases pulled from a strategic plan), measures (attributes or metrics in our case), and stoplight indicators (red, yellow, or green status, which is managed by the thresholds in MicroStrategy).
Most dashboards are simply a series of graphs, charts, gauges, or other visual indicators that a user has chosen to monitor, some of which may or may not be strategically important.