Balanced Scorecard: Today’s challenges Jorge Gomes, Mário Romão ISEG, Rua Miguel Lupi, 20 1200-781 Lisboa, Portugal {jorge.gomes@phd.iseg.ulisboa.pt; mario.romao@iseg.ulisboa.pt} Abstract. In today's global landscape organizations are pressured to develop new capabilities such as flexibility or expertise to respond to the ever-changing technology, competition, and customer preferences. Companies cannot be competitive or successful if their business and information systems and technology (IS/IT) strategies are not aligned. Nowadays, with the growing importance of intangible assets, performance measurement tools must be able to capture this new and important reality. Measuring organizational performance is a difficult and ongoing challenge for managers. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a powerful tool that gives a fast, but comprehensive view of the business including operational measures on customer satisfaction, organization's innovation, activities improvement, as well as financial measurements. This study empirically examines how the BSC has been applied in practice and whether different BSC designs result in varying performance outcomes. In this paper the authors address the BSC and promote the discussion about the strengths and the limitations, underlining the latest developments and future research. Keywords: Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Map, Performance Measurements, Strategic Alignment, IS/IT Investments. 1 Introduction Organizations are required to act in the best of their abilities in the face of competition resulting from globalization and other market factors [1]. To respond to the constraints of the new business environment, the successful organizations developed three major strategies [2]: (1) Train employees in the use of IS/IT to provide organizations of knowledge and responsiveness to answer the pressures to change. (2) Choose for collaborative platforms involving all relevant stakeholders (customers, suppliers and employees) in the business process. (3) Find ways of obtaining superior performance using the frameworks to assist management processes. The inability to achieve the “real” value from IS/IT investments lies mainly in the lack of alignment between the business and the strategies for IS/IT [3]. Strategic alignment positively influences IT effectiveness [4], [5], leading to greater business profitability [6]. From the IS / IT point of view, problems of non-alignment with business strategy typically