Extending balanced scorecard perspectives for benchmarking public organizations

Performance measurement and benchmarking methods like the balanced scorecard face the challenges to measure the idiosyncratic nature of the back-office of public organizations. The goal of this paper is to develop measurement perspectives that take into account public sector characteristics and specific organizational and technical challenges that need to be tackled. We do this by extending the BSC perspectives to fit within the public sector to measure the back-office. Improvement support for measurement and benchmarking process is developed based on the insights gained from literature and this is further refined using case studies. The developed perspectives include collaboration, responsibilities, and political commitment. The findings show that the some perspectives are sector specific and difficult to generalize, but including these perspectives is important for back-office performance improvement.