Development of a hybrid BSC-AHP model for institutions in higher education

Abstract

As issues of performance measurement and issues of accountability become increasingly consequential in higher education, an understanding of the concerns motivating these changes and the new measurement frameworks which are emerging can be extremely useful. The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a tool that translates an organisation's mission and strategy into tangible objectives and measures. The measures are balanced between outcome measures - the results of past efforts - and the measures that drive future performance. This paper develops a balanced scorecard for academic institutions that measures and evaluates day-to-day business operations from following four perspectives: finance, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. This paper also proposes an analytic hierarchy process-based (AHP) approach for prioritising the performance measures of higher level academic institutions on the four perspectives of a balanced scorecard. The approach summarises the evaluation indexes extracted from related literature. Then, the relative weights of the chosen evaluation indexes are calculated using the analytic hierarchy process. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a case study involving a university in South India.