Innovative Budgeting in a Competitive University Environment: Theoretical Concept and Design Considerations for an Information System

The ongoing trend of declining public finances forces state-owned German universities to adapt to increasingly competitive environments and to achieve a high profile not only on the university level, but also on the level of single schools, in order to survive the change process. In order to improve and to control the schools' performance output effectively and to be able to provide incentives, it is inevitable to develop new means of resource distribution on the school level to stimulate goal-oriented efforts of all the members of the school. In this paper, we present a new approach to a goal-oriented budgeting system on school level, which can help to ensure the achievement of the strategic goals of the school. The second part of this paper is dedicated to the creation of an object-oriented analysis and design model of the proposed budgeting approach's problem domain as a starting point for the implementation of a software information system that can assist with planning and allocating budgets for the school's departments