A Balanced Scorecard Approach for Strategy- and Quality-driven pptx

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A Balanced Scorecard Approach for Strategy- and Quality-driven

Universities

Elsa Cardoso*, Maria José Trigueiros*, Patricia Narciso*

*Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Portugal.

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Keywords: Strategic Planning, Balanced Scorecard, Decision

Support Systems.

1 Introduction

This paper describes a Balanced Scorecard Strategic System

integrated in the Decision Support Systems for University

Effectiveness and Efficiency (DSS-UEE) project, developed

at the Department of Sciences and Information Technologies

(DCTI) of Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da

Empresa (ISCTE), a Management, Social Sciences and

Informatics University in Lisbon. This Strategic System is

presented as the main system driving the departmental level

implementation of an effective Information Architecture at

ISCTE. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach was

selected due to its inherent characteristics: it enables the

planning of the strategy and its dissemination to all levels of

the organization; it identifies the initiatives necessary to the

execution of the strategy; and finally, it generates the

performance measures that will allow a quality-driven

information management of the University. The paper

describes the development of the Strategic Information

System for the Creation and Restructuring of Higher

Education Degrees. The relevance of this issue has acquired a

greater importance in Europe with the Bologna reforms,

which represent a unique opportunity for Universities to

reconsider their internal strategy and the quality of their

degrees. The paper reports on the results achieved in the

development of this Strategic System applied to a case study:

the creation of a new Master degree (MSIAD).

1.1 Outline of the paper

This paper is organized in five sections. Section 2 discusses

how the University Strategy must be regarded as a key issue

in the context of the Bologna process reforms. Section 3

presents the DSS-UEE project, and the Decision Support

Systems (DSS) Architecture that is being specified to

effective and efficiently manage the academic information of

an university department. This section contextualizes the

development of the Strategic System as the top layer of the

generic DSS Architecture. Section 4 describes the adopted

Balanced Scorecard methodology used in the implementation

of the Strategic System. Finally, in Section 5 the BSC

approach is presented, applying the first phase of the

methodology to a case study: the creation of a new Master

degree.

2 University Strategy and the Bologna

Challenge

Corporate Strategy is, as defined by [1], the pattern of

decisions in a company that determines and reveals its

objectives, purposes, or goals, produces the main polices and

plans for achieving those goals. It defines the range of

business the company is to pursue, the kind of economic and

human organization it is or intends to be, as well as the nature

of the economic and non-economic contribution it intends to

make to its stakeholders. Applying this broad definition of

Strategy to Higher Education Institutions (HEI) entails the

exercise of looking upon Universities as “companies”. What

are the current strategic objectives, purposes, or goals set

down for the University? The “range of business” for HEI is

related to the core research and teaching areas. What is then

the current University’s “range of business” in which we

must promote excellence? Which plans and polices have been

outlined to execute the strategic decisions in the University?

The stakeholders of the University are the students (our

clients), the academic and administrative staff, the

institutional leaders, and the public community (which

includes the market). Are all our stakeholders aware of the

defined strategy of the University in their daily actions?

The fundamental mission of an University is, as defined in

[2], the advancement of excellence in the creation, sharing

and application of knowledge, typically described in terms of

teaching, scholarship/research, and public service/outreach.

Three core business processes may be identified from this

mission statement: (1) the Teaching (or training) Process,

related with the application of knowledge; (2) the Research

Process, associated with the creation of new knowledge; and

(3) the Sharing Process, the dynamic process of sharing

knowledge between the other two processes. The values that

drive our University mission are innovation, progress,

excellence, and trust. The advancement will be responsible

for the evolution (i.e., continuous learning and growth) of all

three processes (see Figure 1).