Business Process Assessment and Evaluation in Public Administrations using Activity Based Costing

Public administrations in Germany currently face challenges of cost reduction and modernization. Furthermore, PanEuropean directives foster process harmonization and introduction of IT-supported and optimized processes. Hereby activitybased costing can be a useful instrument for process assessment and evaluation. Especially through the introduction of New Public Management and double-entry accounting Public Administrations in Germany now get the opportunity to use costcentered accounting mechanisms to assess process performance and evaluate their activities in a holistic concept. Process Modeling can be a useful instrument to help the public administrations to structure their activities and capture information about them and thereby create a basis for activity-based costing. Therefore, the aim of this article is combining the domain specific process modeling method PICTURE and concept of activity-based costing for supporting Public Administrations in process assessment and evaluation.