The long‐term survival of a business is dependent upon meeting market needs through a long‐term value creation process. Traditional performance measurement systems have been criticized as being too narrowly focused on financial figures and functional level performance such that they often...

Best Value was introduced as a local government policy in 1997, after the election of a New Labour administration. The policy was designed to reconfigure service delivery by local government, with local authorities assuming the role of enablers rather than service providers. In order to help...

Performance improvement is high on the agenda of many companies around the world and with the growing number of improvement models now available care has to be taken to adopt an approach that will yield the most attractive return on investment. This paper compares and contrasts two widely known...

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a management tool that helps to align behavior of all employees to the organization’s strategy. Research suggests that about half of large US firms have already adopted the BSC and many more are considering implementation. Organization‐wide implementation of a...

The use of performance measurement systems and the balanced scorecard has been on the increase, and there is now a trend amongst practitioners and academics to prescribe that rewards should be linked to the measurement system. However, little research has been done in this area. This paper...

With their most recent publications on the balanced scorecard, Kaplan and Norton have focused on the learning and growth perspective in an attempt to clarify its constituent parts, as they acknowledge that many organizations struggle with what to include in this perspective. For that reason...

Purpose – The paper aims to explain how the balanced scorecard concept can be improved through customising the normal four perspectives. Design/methodology/approach – An analysis of existing methods for developing a balanced scorecard reveals that the goals identified by using the approaches...

Purpose – The need for performance improvement has led to the implementation of industry‐specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and greater awareness of the benefits of measurement in construction engineering organisations. This paper aims to present and discuss the findings of a survey...

Purpose – Though a few critics have questioned the effectiveness of the balanced‐scorecard approach in measuring business performance this approach has taken the academic and business community by storm. However, the approach proposed by Kaplan and Norton is not all‐encompassing as they...

Purpose – To elicit the views of Ken Merchant regarding management control and performance. Design/methodology/approach – An interview with Ken Merchant before his keynote speech during the lustrum congress of the Dutch Controllers Institute in November 2004. Findings – Provides an...