Steering the performance of academic institutions: Proposal for a KPI system for a university research laboratory in Morocco

Résumé

Many performance models in the literature, such as Gimsi, Ovar, and the Balanced Scorecard have proven their effectiveness to design dashboards supporting decision-making in higher education institutions and managing organization performance more effectively. In fact, the use of governance tools at the university based on practices like ITIL, COBIT, or Balanced Scorecard has proven its effectiveness in Europe and the United States.

Unfortunately, Moroccan universities have a significant lack of using governance tools based on practices like ITIL, COBIT, or Balanced Scorecard that threaten to compromise good governance. To overcome this challenge, a suitable performance measurement model has become an imperative need to keep each university's functions toward its goals.

In this work, we adopt and implement the Balanced Scorecard model using the BSC-Designer software, to the university context specifically to our research laboratory. The proposed model aims to translate university missions, visions, and objectives into concrete measurement indicators, to be communicated and used to guide it towards excellence. Additionally, we introduce a new indicator for measuring the global laboratory performance called ‘the Global Laboratory Performance Indicator’ to deal with certain BSC limits.