Victor Prochnik

Practitioners' Opinions on Academics' Critics on the Balanced Scorecard

This article presents a survey on the critics to the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) implementation in private organizations and the opinion of Brazilian executives from three different enterprises about these critics. As for Kaplan and Norton (1997) proposal, some outlines were not followed by the interviewed companies, such as the broad communication of BSC to employees and the budget process integration (still prevailing) to the strategic planning. The analysis of the models critiques led to the elaboration of 18 questions. This questionnaire is a useful management tool that can be applied by both practitioners and researchers to access and/or compare the BSC implementation in different organizations. The managers agreed with at least one third of these critics. For instance, interviewees agree that cause-and-effect linear relation tends to simplify reality. Also, financial measures are still more important than those non-financial. As the major explanation for the BSC implementation is exactly to reduce the emphasis on the assistance of financial measures, this issue will continue to be discussed.

Seven Challenges for the Implementation of Balanced Scorecard in Hospitals

The article presents a literature review on performance measurement in health care institutions. This survey identifies seven main challenges to the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The external environment poses three different challenges: more rigorous regulation processes, increasingly diverse customer needs and stiffer competition. In the internal environment, the main challenges to health care management are: conflicts between management and physicians interests, conflicts among value proposals for different kinds of customers, lack of performance measurement methods and inefficient information systems. The empirical part of the article discusses the use of performance measurement techniques by a sample of 15 Brazilian hospitals. The article shows that all the seven challenges found in the international literature are also present in the Brazilian healthcare institutions. Among other conclusions, its shows that healthcare institutions in Brazil make use of several performance measures in day-to-day management. However, the information produced by these measures is not linked to the hospitals strategic planning. In general, the indicators are traditional and well-known and can be applied to any sector of activity. Only some financial and internal process indicators were specific to hospitals needs and could also be found in the international literature. The indicators were distributed unequally across the four BSC perspectives. Much more accurate indicators were available for the financial and internal process approaches than for the other two approaches (clients and learning and growth). Performance measurement systems can thus be said to be much needed in Brazilian hospitals, and the focal task in implementing them is to link them with the strategic plan design. This article was presented at the 3rd CONFERENCE ON PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT CONTROL, Nice, September 22-23, 2005.

A cooperação universidade/empesa: tendências internacionais recentes no setor de informática

A cooperacao entre as universidades e o sistema produti-vem crescendo nos ultimos anos. Entre asvarias dimen-soes possiveis da interacao universidade/empresa, este ar-tigo discute as tendencias, encontradas em outros paises,relativas a transferencia detecnologia informatica.Exemplos de outros setores, nos quais oprogresso tecnicoe muito rapido, como os de microeletronica e de

Analyzing the Low Degree of Innovation in Brazilian Industry by Studying the Least Innovative Firms

This paper analyses the patterns of technological activity found in the 53,102 lower productivity firms (LPFs) in Brazil, a set which encompasses 78.5% of the total number of Brazilian industrial firms (foreign capital firms were not considered). In order to understand the dynamics of the LPFs, we propose a taxonomy of four classes of competitive strategies enabled by the respective firms innovative strategies. Based on this taxonomy, the paper strives to show the existence of a two-way relation between the innovation level and the relative debility of the Brazilian supply of capital goods and software. This is because the innovation in LPFs is characteristically process innovation. Most product innovations seem to result from the purchase of machinery capable of making new products, because the expenditures in R&D are quite low and, for the great majority of firms, discontinuous. The Brazilian industrial and technological policy should thus give emphasis to the diffusion of incorporated technology. This conclusion is at the odds with several of the main concepts proposed nowadays, that recommend an almost exclusive focus on fostering the generation and diffusion of intangible assets

Industrial Complexes Revisited

This article presents some of the results of a research program on industrial dynamics and sectoral interdependence, developed at the Economics Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IE/UFRJ) in the 1980s. The research builds on the French concept of Filiere to put forth an empirical methodology as well as a theoretical framework to analyse industrial clusters. The article describes this methodology, presents the industrial complexes and discusses the alternative theoretical definitions. In the Brazilian research, five major complexes - called macro-complexes hereafter - were singled out: civil construction, machinery and transport equipment, chemicals, textiles and agroindustry. (In addition to these, the paper and printing complex was spotted, since it does not belong to any of the others). In turn, in each of the five macro-complexes mentioned above several micro-complexes were also selected. The industrial complexes analysis was used to study many problems of inter-industrial economics. Technology flows and the diffusion of innovations, the process of industrial diversification, the area of influence of large enterprises, international commerce (an export operation can be viewed as a tie between the productive chain of the exporter country and the productive chain of the importer chain) and industrial and technological policy are some examples. It is also worth mentioning that Brazilian industrial policy has been influenced by the line of research on industrial complexes.

AVALIAÇÃO DE ESTRATÉGIAS ORGANIZACIONAIS: PROPOSTA DE MÉTODO MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Este trabalho descreve um metodo para avaliacao da estrategia organizacional baseado em tres atributos da conceituacao de Slack, Chambers, Harland et al. (1997), e em tres dimensoes analiticas, a saber, enfoque estrategico, formalizacao da estrategia e sua implantacao. Integraram-se diferentes modelos visando avaliar a estrategia e os atributos relacionados, inclusive atraves da associacao de coeficientes numericos associados a cada dimensao analitica. E apresentado parte de um estudo realizado com 45 industrias do interior paulista visando identificar a insercao da questao ambiental na estrategia; isso requereu mais duas dimensoes analiticas, as quais foram associados dois outros coeficientes. Nos grupos estratificados, por porte e setor, os menores valores foram para as tres dimensoes que demandam maiores recursos. Identificou-se a existencia de correlacao linear positiva entre o faturamento das empresas e quatro das dimensoes de avaliacao; para o numero de funcionarios so existem evidencias de correlacao significativa com as duas dimensoes ligadas a questao ambiental. O metodo mostrou-se util por estruturar um procedimento analitico e permitir o uso de tecnicas quantitativas no estudo da estrategia organizacional.

Brazilian Hospital Employee Perceptions of the BSC

ABSTRACT This article discusses the relevance of the use of balanced scorecards (BSCs) in two Brazilian hospitals. The academic criticisms of BSCs were aggregated into 23 topics and presented to a sample of employees from two hospitals, one public and one private. This led to three sets of results: (1) according to respondents, the BSC is applicable to hospitals; (2) employee perception of the BSCs impact on the operations of these hospitals was generally positive and the BSC has allowed them to fix typical management issues, contributing to greater employee participation in strategic management; (3) several BSC criticisms were not rejected while two were accepted: the difficulty of establishing goals and the persistence of traditional budgetary processes. Thus, contrary to part of the technical literature, the BSC was found to be a robust tool because it was considered useful, despite its imperfections.

Cooperation Among Universities, Companies and Government in the National Export Software Program - Softex 2000

From 1992 to 1996, the Brazilian government conducted an industrial policy to support the software sector, known as SOFTEX - 2000. It was an initiative proposed and undertaken by the computer science academic community as part of a broader program to support this field of scientific activities. As a consequence, similarities may be noticed between the organization and conduction of this program and the usually favored University work methods (team work, peer review, flat structure etc.). But the programs main objective, to achieve a 1% international market share in the year 2000, was not reached. Among the causes, one can point to the small size and insufficient technical dynamism of Brazilian software firms, a lack of resources for program development, the choice of exports as the aim of SOFTEX - 2000 and an excessive optimism in determining the export level to be reached. Given the economic conditions of the program and the enterprises and the large size of the Brazilian internal market, a greater concentration on the latter would have meant greater success for SOFTEX - 2000.