Performance evaluation in service companies. Contributions and trends
This issue of Management Control focuses on the so-called service sector or tertiary sector, which represents the most important component of every country’s economy. Since this sector covers a wide variety of activities, this issue gathers contributions on performance measurement systems and metrics used in different types of service businesses, such as transport companies, restaurants, public utilities, financial institutions, software companies and organizations delivering healthcare services.
Reasons for a thematic issue on performance evaluation in service companies are: the speed at which modern countries have made the transition to service-based economies, the emergence of new Internet-based services and ways of using services due to the spread of ICTs and the demand for new management control systems or metrics capable to respect services’ characteristics and their trends of change like the increasing involvement of costumers in service production.
Selected contributions coherently highlight the need to integrate financial performance metrics with the measurement of qualitative and non-monetary results like customer satisfaction and socio-environmental impacts, the shift from monitoring processes to focusing on service outcomes and the opportunity offered by ICTs to collect and elaborate a great amount of data on customers, processes and external sources and use them to improve service managers’ decision making.
Keywords: management control, ICT, public services, performance measurement, service co-production.
