Designing Open Source Business Intelligence for Public Administrations

Business intelligence approaches are standard in private organisations. In public administrations, however, only first steps towards such intelligent managing support are undertaken. Deficits become apparent especially in the move of implementing new public management approaches, such as new accounting systems or an output-oriented management. While public administrations are often obliged to implement such approaches in order to collect management-relevant data, there is little support regarding how to employ these new structures in terms of an intelligent business management. Here, balanced scorecards (BSC) can provide a valuable business intelligence instrument. Core problems that such an approach faces in the domain of public administrations are domain specific requirements, data collection problems in a heterogeneous systems environment, and financial limitations due to budgetary restrictions. Our design science-oriented case study on BSC implementation in public administrations introduces a solution which bases on an open source approach and addresses the problem of data collection by BSC and project management software integration. A case study analysis identifies generalisable issues which can potentially be applied to other situational and organisational contexts. Summary of Arguments • Paradigmatic changes in public administration management, for instance, regarding the accounting system (Neues Kommunales Finanzmanagement) or output-oriented management (Neues Steuerungsmodell), reveal severe deficits in strategic thinking in public agencies. • Balanced Scorecards (BSC), if adapted to the specific context of public administrations, are a valuable instrument for implementing strategic thinking in these organisations.