ABSTRACT
Public sector organizations necessarily have a different perspective concerning the customer value proposition. Their “stakeholders” are normally taxpayers and their stewardship of public money has to be with a view to maximizing efficiency and demonstrating this good management of resources through transparency and public accountability. There is no profit motive, and no requirement or expectation to produce an increase in share value, or a return on investment in conventional corporate terms. They were, therefore, among the early adopters of the Balanced Scorecard, recognizing that it could provide both a strategic performance measurement system and a framework to capture and summarize results for publication. Having in many cases already espoused Quality Management principles, and award schemes for quality standards like Investors in People, they were quick to realize that this was a useful and complementary addition to their “toolkit” of methodologies for managing continuous improvement of service delivery.
