Abstract:

The University, as an institution, is key to the modernization of society in their teaching and research function. Currently, there is a high competitiveness among universities so universities seek continuous improvement, effectiveness and economic efficiency. This competitiveness means that universities have to adapt to the needs of the society so universities goals emphasize the productivity and quality in teaching and research in order to promote solutions that provide the necessary knowledge so managers of universities can make the best decisions.

Carlos III University of Madrid has carried out a project to provide universities a technological support to track in real-time the strategic objectives and thus facilitates the diagnosis of the current situation of the university and improves the decision making process. The main objective of the project was to develop a Balanced Scorecard oriented to universities management in order to know the actual status of universities providing reliable information about several key areas.

The Balanced Scorecard aligns the vision of the university with its mission to obtain the deviation suffered by the initial plan of the university, to minimize risks, and to make decisions.

The Balanced Scorecard helps the university in the following aspects:
• Improve the alignment of business with operational strategy
• Learning from past mistakes
• Improve processes of the organization
• Increase operational efficiency
• Improve customer service
• Discover areas of improvement
• Discover new opportunities
• Improve management and control
• Manage the financial parameters more efficiently

The Balanced Scorecard has been designed considering that universities not only try to maximize profits, they also must provide services in the best way possible, therefore, in universities we can identify the following key areas:
• Budget: this area contains the information of the annual budget broken down into income and expenditure. The information appears in different formats to make comparisons with previous years.
• Human Resources: this area shows the staff of the university each year; relevant information of research and teaching relating on the staff.
• Students: this area contains the information of the new students; a comparative of students among universities; Erasmus students sent and received by the university; Erasmus students for countries; grading students; number of students for campus,
• Infrastructure: Changes occurred in recent years regarding of the number of departments, libraries, etc.; infrastructure for campus;

Also, the Balanced Scorecard will allow the monitoring of strategic and business goals of processes through management of key indicators in different areas of the university.

The paper is structured as follows. Section two describes the objectives and the competitive advantages of deployment a Balanced Scorecard in the universities. Also, this section describes a comparative analysis of tools for their design and development. Section 3 explains and shows the Balanced Scorecard developed in the project. Finally, section 4 presents the conclusions and future work.

Keywords:

University Management, Educational Management, Decision Making, Balanced Scorecard.