A Novel City Benchmarking Methodology: Multidimensional Managerial Insight

Abstract

Benchmarking is a managerial tool that enables decision-makers to make critical inferences about their organizations from different perspectives such as their strengths and weaknesses, priorities, past and future. Benchmarking cities receives considerable research interest mainly because of its potential benefits to managers in evaluating policies and making strategic decisions. Current research on city benchmarking focuses on identifying the benchmark factors and developing methods for measuring the benchmark scores. In other words, the existing methods aim to derive city benchmark scores by combining the weighted factors and compare cities based on their respective scores. However, policymakers tend to request more detailed information to guide their policies, rather than having a simple scoring. This study aims to fill this gap with a novel benchmarking approach. The proposed approach relies on the sensitivity analysis of the multi-criteria decision-making technique adopted in benchmarking, and offers decision-makers three main outputs for each city: (i) delivering a consensual ranking that is free of decision-maker bias, (ii) indicating priority areas under which require the least effort to achieve better ranking, and (iii) revealing the relative effects of the previous policy results and projecting the future ranking if the current policies remain same. The implementation of the proposed methodology is illustrated by a case study. The case study highlights that adopting the proposed methodology is promising since it provides insightful managerial information to decision-makers.

Keywords

• benchmarking
• cities
• multi criteria decision-making
• sensitivity analysis

Yeni Bir Şehir Kıyaslama Metodolojisi: Çok Boyutlu Yönetimsel İçgörü

Öz

Kıyaslama, karar vericilerin kuruluşları hakkında güçlü ve zayıf yönleri, öncelikleri, geçmişi ve geleceği gibi farklı perspektiflerden kritik çıkarımlar yapmalarını sağlayan bir yönetim aracıdır. Şehirlerin kıyaslaması, yöneticilere politikaların değerlendirilmesi ve stratejik kararlar alınması açısından sağladığı faydalar nedeniyle bilim insanlarının ilgisini çekmektedir. Şehir kıyaslaması üzerine mevcut araştırmalar, kıyaslama faktörlerini belirlemeye ve kıyaslama skorlarını ölçmek için yöntemler geliştirmeye odaklanmıştır. Bir diğer ifadeyle, mevcut yöntemler, şehirleri karşılaştırmak için ağırlıklı faktörleri birleştirerek tek bir puan hesaplamayı amaçlamaktadır. Bununla birlikte, politika yapıcılar, politikalarına rehberlik etmek için basit bir puanlamaya sahip olmak yerine daha ayrıntılı bilgi talep etme eğilimindedir. Bu çalışmada önerilen kıyaslama yaklaşımı bu boşluğu doldurmayı amaçlamaktadır. Önerilen yaklaşım, kıyaslama için kabul edilen çok kriterli karar verme tekniğinin duyarlılık analizine dayanmaktadır ve karar vericiler her şehir için üç ana çıktı sunmaktadır: (i) karar verici yanlılığından uzak, uzlaşıya dayalı bir sıralama sunar, (ii) daha iyi sıralama elde etmek için minimum çaba gerektiren öncelikli alanları gösterir ve (iii) geçmişten bugüne uygulanan politikaların sonuçlarının göreceli etkilerini sergiler ve geçmişten bugüne uygulanan politikalar devam ettirilirse şehrin gelecekteki sıralamasını yansıtır. Metodolojinin uygulanışı bir vaka çalışması ile gösterilmektedir. Vaka çalışması, önerilen metodolojiyi uygulamanın karar vericiye önemli yönetimsel çıkarımlar sunması sebebiyle oldukça ümit verici olduğunu vurgulamaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• kıyaslama
• şehirler
• çok kriterli karar verme
• duyarlılık analizi

Kaynakça

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