Applicability of Balanced Scorecard in public sector: The case of ombudsman institution

The concerns on efficiency and effectiveness in public and private sectors resulted in a search for solutions. Many performance techniques and methods initially developed by private sector organizations have been adopted by governmental organizations later. Balanced Socercards (BSC) developed in late 1990s by Kaplan and Norton as a comprehensive performance evaluation method in private sector. Recently it has been widely used in both public and private organizations. The balanced scorecard examines performance from four perspectives; financial perspective, customer perspective, internal perspective, learning and growth perspectives. There are varieties of public sector applications of BSC throughout the world. The debates concentrated on the readiness for the applicability of BSC because of culture and nature of public sector organizations. Therefore, this thesis sought explanations for the research question of "What accounts for the applicability of balanced scorecards method as a performance evaluation system in public sector?" To do this, semi-structured and open-ended "face to face questionnaire" was prepared and done with 63 participants; civil servants, experts, middle and top managers out of total 107 employees in the agency. Our general hypothesis of "the applicability of BSC is more likely if maturity of the institution is higher than median value or assigned value" was tested with T test for one sample. The finding show that our hypothesis was supported overall in four dimensions of BSC, with few exceptions. It means that The Ombudsman Institution is ready or mature enough to apply all dimensions of BSC. Thesis concluded with summary of findings, recommendations and suggestions for future research. Keywords: Performance Evaluation in Public Sector, Balanced Scorecard, the Applicability of BSC, Organizational Performance Evaluation, Ombudsman Institution