Managing and Measuring sustainability: the business case of public utility industry

Abstract

The most advanced organizations recognize that a multidimensional perspective is necessary to integrate stakeholder needs into a long term value creation process, but only in a few cases performance measurement systems are able to integrate traditional measures with social and environmental indicators. To quantify sustainability, and to understand the factors that contribute to it, we propose a performance measurement system based on a set of indicators that are structured in two levels: primary and secondary measures. These measures are further organized using two managerial instruments, showing the horizontal (DartBoard) and vertical (Clover) relationships between them.