Taiwan's location in the typhoon-beset western Pacific and on the Pacific-rim fault belt makes it the target of frequent natural disasters such as typhoons, floods, and earthquakes. Ever-increasing population densities due to social evolutions and technology advances, along with the diffusion of international terrorist attacks, further threaten to maximize the potential damages that all forms of disasters might inflict. According to the domestic laws, the responsibilities of the fire departments in Taiwan have evolved from traditional fire control and the supply of ambulance service to including emergency rescues for typhoons, floods, earthquakes, and accidental or criminal explosions. With the current limited resources and expanding responsibilities, to improve the management capabilities and efficiencies poses a major challenge to the fire department.
This study chooses the fire department of Kao-Hsiung County as the research case in an attempt using the Balanced Scorecard to develop an performance management system that puts the strategies into action and to establish an objective and feasible performance standard. This system is aimed to give a timely evaluation of the performance in the execution of the fire department's work, which, along with the endeavor of the fire department, will be made available to the general public as well as to the fire department itself.
Through interviews at the management level and bibliography reviews, we obtain 25 strategy objectives and 39 evaluation indices, which are reduced to 20 strategy objectives and 28 evaluation indices by questionnaire investigation. The results indicate that the indices of public services, internal management, employee training, and financial resources show a stronger consensus than the that of community safety, suggesting that the fire department has a strong agreement of task on increasing the financial resources, streamlining the internal workflow, and improving the job-related training to strengthen its capabilities. On the other hand, we find a lesser agreement on the adoption of positive actions of fire safety inspections to solidify the community safety. ANOVA and Independent t test show significant differences of index choices among different age groups. Notable differences due to the discrepancies in ages and work areas are also observed on recognition of the feasibility of the performance evaluation system.
It is found that the elements of current performance evaluation system of the institution in this case study are scattered in various laws and regulations and are designed to merely meet the minimum requirements as specified by the laws. By the design of balanced scorecard and the statistical analysis, we reach the following conclusions and related recommendations:
1. To simplify the service procedure, based on the customer-oriented concept, more authorization should be granted.
2. A crucial factor in the success of fire control and ambulance supply is the reaction time, which should be minimized by the development of a standard operation procedure (SOP).
3. To eliminate the most common complaint about the lack of timeliness regarding the fire department's service, it is suggested that a computerized information management system be developed to facilitate the supervisor's work of control and evaluation.
4. As an incentive, a performance-feedback mechanism should be established as the criteria for the distribution of resources, which include, among others, the award, the staff size, and the budget.
5. To gain the satisfaction, recognition, and support of the public to elevate the fire department's social status and morale, innovation should always be stressed and encouraged.
6. As an impetus for the high-level management to push the performance-based management, publicity through internet or traditional media is an effective tool.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-1127103-121014 |
| Date | 27 November 2003 |
| Creators | Li, Yu-Ling |
| Contributors | none, none, none |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-1127103-121014 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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