By Dobby Young ( From CIO.com)

Mitre Corp., an independent, not-for-profit company, provides federal agencies with system engineering and information technology expertise. Founded in 1958, the Bedford, Mass.-based company's more than 4,000 employees support four primary customers: the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. intelligence community and the Internal Revenue Service.

In their book The Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton set forth a hypothesis about the chain of cause and effect that leads to strategic success. This cause-and-effect hypothesis is fundamental to understanding the metrics that the balanced scorecard prescribes. There are four stages to this chain of cause and effect, outlined as follows: