Rethinking institutional excellence in Ethiopia: adapting and adopting the balanced scorecard (BSC) model

This paper intends to outline an academic scorecard that serves as a strategic framework for measuring institutional performance in Ethiopia. It gives major emphasis for producing initial portfolio of key performance indicators that will serve as a springboard for measuring performance in academic institutions. The study relied on meta-analysis of existing BSC-related literature in business and mission-driven organizations across the globe with an intention of benchmarking the best practices in the area. A comprehensive analysis and synthesis of an extant literature resulted in an architectural blueprint of BSC for academic institutions operating in Ethiopia. This has been built around five strategic themes that serve as pillars of excellence for HEIs (viz., academic excellence, diversity of student community, outreach and engagement, resource management, and networking and partnership) and four perspectives, which are different views of what drives the institution and those which provide a framework for measurement of its performance. The identified perspectives include the stakeholders, the internal business process, financial stewardships, and learning, innovation and development (LID). A number of strategic objectives and measurement metrics have been forwarded under each perspective in line with the HEI’s mission. The researcher expects that such BSC framework will arouse a great deal of interest in opening discussions and debates among academics, HEIs officials, policy makers, reform consultants and others in a way they serve as a good ground for developing common understanding and outlining a skeleton of academic scorecard to be standardized for more or less uniform application in the Ethiopian HEIs.