Core process: The fundamental activities, or group of activities, so critical to an organization's success that failure to perform them in an exemplary manner will result in deterioration of the organization's mission.

Customer: The person or group that establishes the requirement of a process and receives or uses the outputs of that process, or the person or entity directly served by the organization.

Environment: Circumstances and conditions that interact with and affect an organization. These can include economic, political, cultural, and physical conditions inside or outside of the organization.

External customer: An individual or group outside the boundaries of the producing organization that receives or uses the output of the process.

Initiative: Key action programs, strategic in nature, and not operations as usual projects, which are developed to achieve objectives or close gaps between performance measures and targets. Initiatives are often known as projects, actions, or activities. They differ from objectives in that they specifically define boundaries, ie, a stated budget and period of completion, and an assigned person or team to accomplish them. A combination of several initiatives may support an objective or theme.

Internal customer: An individual or group inside the boundaries of the producing organization that receives or uses the output from a previous stage or process to contribute to production of the final product or service.

Key performance indicator: Measurable factor of extreme importance to the organization in achieving its strategic goals, objectives, vision, and values that, if not implemented properly, would likely result in a significant decrease in customer satisfaction, employee morale, and effective financial management.

Lag Indicators: Result-oriented measures determining the outcome of an objective that indicates company performance following an accepted period.

Lead Indicators: Measures indicating progress against a process or behavior helpful in predicting the future outcome of an objective.

Measures: Measurable values that contribute to the understanding and quantification of a key performance indicator.

Metrics: The elements of a measurement system consisting of key performance indicators, measures, and measurement methodologies.

Milestone: The set of specific deadlines or hurdles that signal progress in completing an initiative. Milestones include progress/completion dates or percentage completion rates, key presentations/meetings, and key decision points.

Mission: An enduring statement of purpose; the organization's reason for existence. The mission describes what the organization does, who it does it for, and how it does it.

Organizational Enablers: The necesssary culture of the organization as well as the skills, knowledge, tools and resources, that will enable it to achieve its strategy.

Outcome measure: An assessment of the results of a program activity as compared to its intended purpose.

Owner: The owners of an establishment are those which have created, invested in, or borrowed the capital which forms the basis required for the services and operations of production to begin and/or continue. In the case of a government organizations, taxpaying citizens are both owners and customers.

Output measure: Tabulation, calculation, or recording of activity or effort.

Performance goal: A target level of an activity expressed as a tangible measurable objective, against which actual achievement can be compared.

Performance Indicators: Performance measures which are not actual targets, but which may be tracked and trended over time as indicators of the abilities or motivation to achieve targets and goals and used in the evaluation of what changes are necessary to improve performance.

Performance management: The use of performance measurement information to help set agreed-upon performance goals, allocate and prioritize resources, inform managers to either confirm or change current policy or program directions to meet those goals, and report on the success in meeting those goals.

Performance measure: A quantitative or qualitative characterization of performance.

Performance measurement: A process of assessing progress toward achieving predetermined goals, including information on the efficiency with which resources are transformed into goods and services (outputs), the quality of those outputs (how well they are delivered to clients and the extent to which clients are satisfied) and outcomes (the results of a program activity compared to its intended purpose), and the effectiveness of government operations in terms of their specific contributions to program objectives.

Stakeholder: Any person, group, or organization that has the potential either to have an influence upon (either to detract from or improve), or to be affected by the organization's resources, processes or outputs.

Strategic direction: The organization's goals, objectives, and strategies by which it plans to achieve its vision, mission, and values.

Strategic goal: A long-range change target that guides an organization's efforts in moving toward a desired future state.

Strategic objective: A broad time-phased measurable accomplishment required to realize the successful completion of a strategic goal.

Strategic planning: A continuous and systematic process whereby guiding members of an organization make decisions about its future, develop the necessary procedures and operations to achieve that future, and determine how success is measured.

Strategy-Focused Organization^[BSC] (SFO): A Strategy-Focused Organization places strategy at the center of its management processes, ie, central to its agenda. There are five principles to a Strategy-Focused Organization:

Strategy Map: A visual representation of an organization’s strategy, including the processes and systems necessary to implement that strategy, and how employees jobs are linked to the overall objectives.

Value Chain: The steps by which the organization moves from the identification of customer needs to fulfillment of those needs.

Value Proposition: The unique mix of service, price, product, relationship and image offered to customers. This determines the which market segments are targeted and how the organization will differentiate itself from the competition within those market segments.

Vision: An idealized view of a desirable and potentially achievable future state where or what an organization would like to be in the future.

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. (BSC) glossary
Glossary:   Benchmarking Study Report, Library, National Partnership for Reinventing Government