Balanserade styrkort i primärvården i landstinget i Östergötland
en analys av styrkort och processer
SummaryBackground: Management control is important for all kinds of activities, both in trade and industry and in the public sector since you must economize on scarce resources. There are nevertheless many different views on management control, which have changed with the times. With regard to the public sector in Sweden, the management control systems have changed radically the last half century, especially from the 1980s, due to depressions and increased focus on effectiveness. New approaches have been taken by many municipalities and county councils, both in Sweden and internationally, where the former management control systems have been abandoned in favour of result control, target costing, and activity-based-costing, for example. Another new approach has been the Balanced Scorecard, which was introduced by Kaplan & Norton in a pioneering article in 1992.The Balanced scorecard is a multidimensional tool, originally intended to be used in trade and industry, but with regard to its nature, it has been adopted even by many non-commercial organizations, especially in Sweden. The County Councils have generally introduced the concept before the municipalities, even though there is an exception to every rule. One county council which is in the forefront is the County Council of Östergötland, which found the Balanced scorecard interesting as early as in 1992, even though it was then a tentative idea. Today, the whole organization is marked by the Balanced Scorecard approach. Strangely enough, no external evaluation has ever been made of the Balanced scorecard in the County Council of Östergötland, which we consider is an argument for doing so in a master thesis.Purpose: The purpose is to investigate how the primary care sector in the County Council of Östergötland uses the Balanced scorecard as a management control tool, and to discuss if Balanced Scorecard is an appropriate model for managing the organization.Procedure: The study is based on a qualitative method, where we have made six personal interviews with people working at different levels in the primary care sector in the County Council of Östergötland, in order to be able to get some knowledge of the whole chain. This approach coincides with our hermeneutic basic view. We have, with regard to the scarcity of time within the thesis course, been forced to make a delimitation, which means that we have only investigated the primary care in the western part of Östergötland. Then the study contains a documentary investigation, used as the theoretical frame of reference.Results: The results show that the primary care sector in the County Council of Östergötland have been quite successful in their work with the Balanced Scorecard so far. With regard to the management?s purpose, the model is quite adequate to reach their objectives. Nevertheless, we consider that the situation today indicates that they did not use the potential of the scorecards. Further commitments has to be done within the areas of strategic learning and a frame of reference, to be able to use the Balanced Scorecard as a that management control tool its was inteded to be, originally