The balanced scorecard technique is ideal for planning and managing smart city and smart government initiatives. The balanced scorecard technique, when properly applied, enables governments to focus on what’s important in a complex multi-organizational context. Effective smart city initiatives require coordination among many actors: multiple city agencies, community groups, civil society, businesses, non-profits, academic institutions, regional and national government agencies. It’s beyond coordination – it’s also about finding balance. The 10 Ps approach provides a framework to consider, assuming that the outer spheres of public goods and politics have been handled prior to building the scorecard.
The remaining 8 characteristics for smart government can be modeled in the balanced scorecard.
The traditional scorecard concepts of citizen (customer in the private sector), finance, internal processes and learning & growth perspectives can be thought of as:
- Partnerships with citizens, civil society, businesses, academic institutions
- Public Finance to capture the unique characteristics of government financial management such as budgeting and commitment accounting
- Process matching the process requirements of the balanced scorecard
- People focused on learning and growth of the public service, that could be extended to consider citizens
The balanced scorecard relies on mapping as many as 20 performance measures aligned across the four perspectives that should provide improved levels of predictability as initiatives are implemented. These performance measures should be aligned to major programs that are aligned to policy where 1 policy should be expressed in 2 or more programs that span 2 or more perspectives.