Finding Balanced Scorecards for Business Driven IT Service Portfolio Management: A Literature Review

During the last decades information technology (IT) management has changed significantly. Starting from being a costly and rare resource in its very beginnings IT has evolved into a vital enabler for almost any kind of business today. This development demands for highly flexible management concepts allowing the business to actively control and govern IT performance. A meanwhile widely used approach for multi-dimensional performance measurement in the context of IT management is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). With this article we aim at investigating the state of the art of IT BSC use through a comprehensive literature analysis. Moreover, we evaluate the adaptability of the different types of this concept to the most recent developments in IT management. Our findings show that even though an opulence of IT BSCs exists, they do not reflect recent developments of increased business orientation in IT management. We suggest that two new BSCs utilizing such business metrics need to be developed: A generic BSC for IT services and IT service portfolios.