Using Balanced Scorecards to Manage IT Strategies in Public Organizations: The Case of Jeddah Municipality

Abstract

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), used for performance measurement and strategy management, is composed of four perspectives linked by cause and effect relations in the following order: Learning and Growth, Internal Processes, Customers, and Financial, with the financial perspective being the final outcome. This paper describes how the IT Department at the Jeddah Municipality adopted the BSC to match its strategic objectives as a nonprofit function of a public service organization, placing its financial perspective as an input and its Customer perspective as the final outcome. This is in line with the fact that the IT Department uses budgets allocated by the government and is customer-centric, not profit-centric. The concept of altering the BSC by placing the Customer perspective at the top, which is proposed in this paper, can be used by other public service organizations which aim to be customer-centric. The paper also demonstrates how the Jeddah Municipality IT BSC guides the Municipality IT strategy, management, and budget planning and provides two tools which complement the IT BSC which are the Project and Strategic Objectives Matrix and the Project and Budget Planning Matrix. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]