Budget utilization as a performance metric for business school libraries: practice in India

The All India Council for Technical Education reports around 3,600 Business Management Education Schools in India. This paper examines the prominent practice of overall performance evaluation used by libraries of these business schools. Three hundred sixty-nine libraries were surveyed through a questionnaire. A t-test was deployed to evaluate the two hypotheses. The survey results and testing of hypothesis 1 show that the vast majority of libraries (80 percent) are using the percentage utilization of annual budgetary allocation to evaluate their performance. Most of them operate within the annual budget, considered an at-par performance. However, the study's findings (testing of hypothesis 2) further show that no scientific method is followed in preparing the budget. As ad-hoc methods in budgeting can lead to poor outcomes, librarians need to adopt a professional approach in their budgeting processes. The implications of our study are that academic libraries should use the performance metric more systematically. Librarians should be well involved in the budgeting process, and controllers should seek their active participation in the budgeting process. The entire performance evaluation exercise needs to be taken more seriously, and the variances between the actual and the budgets should be thoroughly investigated. It should be remembered that unless the budgets are designed systematically, just being inside or around the budget cannot be taken as an effective performance.