Customer Success

Vienna City Administration

Greater Transparency in Public Administration

Public institutions have increasingly come under pressure in recent years to become more economically viable and customer-oriented. The shift from government department to a business management oriented, targeted organization requires many changes both inside the company and in the way it is presented to the outside world. With public institutions in particular, however, key financial figures are not in any way meaningful enough to provide a basis for measuring and controlling the performance of the organization.

The Vienna (Austria) City Administration is one of the public administration institutions to have recognized this need at an early stage and to be prepared to employ modern management methods. With its staff of 60,000 (including 30,000 in the area of health and 1,000 in accounting), the Vienna City Administration is now moving into a new era of customer-oriented, innovative city administration.

A demonstration of good quality
The Vienna City Administration has been looking at the topic of the balanced scorecard for some years. The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) developed by the European Union offers a management concept specially tailored for public administration that has been adopted by the Vienna City Administration and that can be very well-implemented using a balanced scorecard. "After all, quality is more than just business management figures," says Government Councilor Franz Döller of Administrative Department 6, initiator of the balanced scorecard project. "With the balanced scorecard, we primarily want to demonstrate the high quality of our organization and break the concept of quality down into more detail. This will change the corporate culture in the medium term and thus bring a lasting change in our image. In addition, through contracting, we also want to cover topics that affect our clients and partners (hospitals, schools and so on) with the balanced scorecard."

The balanced scorecard – a mixture of financial data and soft facts
Providing the data for the balanced scorecard was relatively simple – Administrative Department 6 (Accounts Department) has huge volumes of data – invoice data, statistics, quantities determined, results of surveys, and so on. Because the city administration puts such great importance on so-called "soft facts" and is aware of their influence on the organization, regular staff and customer surveys are carried out. Some time ago, performance monitoring was also carried out, when the performance of the individual employees was measured and recorded in accordance with strict criteria. There is no lack of data, but it was spread all around the organization and stopped anyone from seeing the most important elements.

On the premise of less is more, the balanced scorecard encourages concentration on the real driving forces in an organization. For the conceptual work on the balanced scorecard, which is naturally the most time-consuming, working groups were formed at the city administration in which staff debated, laid down interdependencies and defined objectives and parameters. To ensure that the results cannot be manipulated, the findings that were defined (views, strategic objectives) will be used for the next five years. Changes and improvements will be made if necessary in a "second presentation." Updating and a target-actual comparison will be carried out on a quarterly basis.

Fast and easy
The decision in favor of SAS Strategic Performance Management for a balanced scorecard solution was made after a thorough examination of all the products available. After looking around extensively in the market and considering other suppliers, the decision makers felt that the SAS solution won out primarily on the basis of the following features:

Fast start with the first scorecards due to rapid, uncomplicated implementation
Easy handling, low training requirement for staff
Good presentation providing a wide-ranging overview
Simple data transfer and entry through direct access to, for example, SAP R/3, Microsoft Office
Solution contains documentation assistance due to the pre-defined structures

Satisfied staff creating satisfied customers
Initially, the balanced scorecard is to be introduced into all 40 offices of Administrative Department 6 in two stages; it will then be extended to cover the entire Vienna City Administration. Every office manager and the 1,000 employees in Administrative Department 6 have access to the balanced scorecard via the organization's intranet. The first page can be called up by all members of the staff so that they can become familiar with the new management tool and to generate a certain curiosity. "Our aim is to make the balanced scorecard the central management system," Döller explains.

Franz Döller
Government councilor