Public Sector Business Intelligence - An Open Source Approach

Approaches to strategic Information Systems (IS) are standard in private organisations. In Public Administrations (PA), however, only first steps towards strategic managing support are undertaken. Deficits become apparent especially regarding new public management (NPM) approaches, such as new accounting systems or an output-oriented management. While PA are often obliged to implement such NPM approaches in order to collect management-relevant data, there is little support regarding how to employ these new structures in terms of strategic management. Here, Balanced Scorecards (BSC) can provide a valuable strategic management instrument. Core problems that such an approach faces in the domain of PA are domain specific requirements, data collection problems in a heterogeneous IS environment, and financial limitations due to budgetary restrictions. This paper presents a design science-oriented case study on BSC design and organisational implementation in a medium-sized local PA. It introduces a solution based on an Open Source Software (OSS) approach which 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.