Blame it on the balanced scorecard. Though not the first to devise a business scorecard, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton set off a flurry of interest in people-related metrics with the publication of their 1996 book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action. In a Kaplan-Norton type scorecard, there are four buckets, one of which is for people. "That bucket is usually handed to HR to populate with data," says Alec Levenson, senior research scientist at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations.