Implementation of BSC in Sri Lankan government organizations

Most of the Sri Lankan government and government related organizations are in underperformed level and financially not profitable. When looking at their management practices, it is clear that most of them still use conventional management practices which cascading down generations of managers as well as almost unchanged and unchallenged, despite the market dynamics. These traditional practices have hampered the accomplishment of strategic goals significantly influencing for organizational failures. Therefore, strategic planning is an essential thing to improve the performance of the government organizations in Sri Lanka. Through this, business activities can bealigned to the vision and strategy of the organization, internal and external communications can be improved, and alsocan monitor organization performance against strategic goals. Most of the government organizations in Sri Lanka misinterpret annual budgeting process as the actual strategic planning. This makes the whole organizational performance to measure based only on financial targets, hence the real performance never been measured in terms of the in line with the company vision and mission,  actual market potential or the competitive advantage the organization. Therefore, implementation of Balanced Score Card is crucial in Sri Lankan government and semi-government organizations to align strategies into operations throughout the organizations as well as to measure performance of areas in the organization and directing everyone to in to one direction. Implementation of BSC can provide several advantages to improve the performance of government and government related organizations. The most significant benefit is theability to decide a suitable strategy which aligningthat to the daily operations in all areas of the organization. In addition, BSC also act as a communication tool. This is being done through assessing performance, informing the future targets while giving room for re-forecasting and analyzing any faults by helping managers to communicate from top-down or bottom-up. Moreover, the scorecard can manage all aspects of organization to achieve its overall goals within a specified time with limited resources. In fact, it can identifythe requirement of resources and situationswhere resources are not optimized. Finally, BSCcan also be used as a performance management systemby linking the performance to the overall strategic objectives and aligning the rewarding mechanisms appropriately to encourage the right behaviors.

However, when BSC is implementing in Sri Lankan government and government related organizations, there are few things that need to be highly concerned for making it success. Use of unique score card to each organization, without adopting or coping from another industry is highly important as every organization has unique strategic objectives.

Involvement of top management and change of organizational culture to facilitate the successful implementation are one the key factors that have been identified in Malaysian GLC case study. This could be a challenge with respect of Sri Lankan government organizations as they have very traditional organizational culture which is very reluctant to changes. Therefore, the top management has an important responsibility to change this conventional nature and this can be achieved through their actively participation for the process. The need of centralized common IT system is essential for the proper implementation of BSC. But unfortunately most of our government and government related organizations are poorly IT facilitated, therefore, establishment of proper IT system and link all the work in to that system is highly significant for the proper implementation of BSC.

At present, KPIs used in may government and government related organizations are only financially oriented and they need to be revised based on BSC as allowing to measure both financial and non-financial measures. Even though, the BSC is originally for measure individual performance when it is applied to local context in needs to be divert from individual perspective to team perspective. Since Sri Lankan culture is more team oriented, for the proper implementation of BSC, team performance should be measured and not be flowed down to individual levels. This is important especially when it comes to operational and middle management levels. This team performance through the scorecard would help synergize the performance of all employees and induce them to pull in one direction.

In addition as the Malaysian case study revealed, management accountants in the local government and government related organizations have the biggest responsibility of implementing BSC by coordination with other departments. Finally, the success story of proper implementation of BSC in Malaysian GLC can be adopted as a dummy for the local government organizations to make them well performed entities. The factors identified from that study which considered as critical for appropriate implementation of BSC canalso be applied in Sri Lankan government and government related organizations with relevant adjustments with respect local context.  Conclusion

The referred article has tried to investigate the important factors contributed to successful implementation of BSC in a particular Malaysian Government-linked company. The study has identified commitment of top management, interpersonal communication channel, existence of common standardized IT system and change of company culture as the important factors for successful BSC implementation. In addition, the important role that management accountants play as change agents in BSC implementation process also has been identified. This study can be applied to the Sri Lankan government organizations, as they are heavily require to shift from traditional management practices to strategic management tool such as BSC to improve the organizational performance. When BSC is applying to Sri Lankan government organizations there need to be done some modifications to match with local context. One such prominent adjustment is shifting from individual perspective to team perspective to match with Sri Lankan culture and this is more important in operational and middle management level.