Stakeholder Claims or Programming Targets. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in a Public Service Media Firm.
Published for 2008, RIPE@2008Angelica Håkansson, Sune Tjernström
Media Management, School of Communication and Design, Kalmar University
Abstract
Against the somewhat skeptical theoretical background of Mintzberg’s analysis of the rise and fall of strategic planning (1994), this article makes the observation that the Swedish Television Corporation (SVT) at one stage had three planning systems, one for each of the three cultures that Engwall (1978) claimed were typical of media companies. It all depends on what you mean by planning and planning systems, of course. In this case, planning means any formal analytical process that involves ‘thinking about the future’ and ‘integrating various decisions related strategies for the future’. With planning thus loosely defined, it can be argued that the professional culture in SVT, the public service ideologists, have produced one system, the processes that lead up to the Public Service Evaluations. These are a thorough assessment of the extent to which the public service mission has been fulfilled during each year of review. The emphasis is on ex-post evaluation, but to the extent that these statistics are used in program planning, the focus may also be on future programming strategies.
The technical culture in SVT has produced a series of innovations, especially related to access and distribution via the Internet, which all could be seen as the result of a second approach to thinking about the future. Here innovations related to e.g. high definition TV and a host of other technical development work was disregarded, for the sake of simplicity. Finally, the administrative culture, management, produced a planning system by and large modeled after the Balanced scorecard approach (BSC), stating the overall programming goals in market terms (reaching a young segment of the public). This goal-oriented planning system in SVT seemed to share the strengths and weaknesses of most other strategic planning system. In the discussion, it is argued that some sort of convergence of these planning systems, based on stakeholder claims, programming targets or development of Internet services would be desirable to achieve more of what Mintzberg called ‘integrative decision making’.