From cost accounting to strategic cost management

This chapter explores cost management at the strategic level. It focuses on these issues, presenting the experience of the Good Practice project. The chapter also focuses on three cases that are representative of how universities adopted a strategic approach to cost management. It offers a picture that is very distant from the often-employed cost-cutting approach. Cost data are instead part of a more strategic vision, although always coupled with other data. The chapter focuses on a longitudinal action research project carried out in Italian state universities. The participants found it particularly interesting that an indicator could be used for all activities that worked with the same output/driver. The overall costs of the macro-activities were divided among the basic activities on the basis of the quota of time spent by staff on each basic activity. Good Practice-based research is heterogeneous in its use of costs, which are, in general, coupled with other performance indicators.