The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has long struggled to fulfil its strategic management potential in public administration. Despite its conceptual appeal, fragile causeeffect relationships, limited analytical capabilities, and persistent implementation gaps continue to undermine its effectiveness in the sector. This paper reports an empirical implementation of the Balanced Scorecard Ontology (BSO) at the Secretaria-Geral do Governo (SG-Gov), the central coordinating body of Portuguese government, examining how semantic web technologies can address these structural limitations. Grounded in a case study serving as a pilot iteration of an ongoing doctoral research program aligned with Design Science Research principles, the study produced a formally validated ontology encompassing 15 strategic objectives, 43 performance indicators, and 51 cause-effect relationships, integrated with a seven-level analytical dashboard. Technical and empirical validation provided initial evidence of ontological robustness and functional adequacy for non-specialist public managers. These preliminary findings suggest that automatic gap identification, cause-effect network analysis, and formal consistency verification can substantially enhance BSC's analytical capability in a public sector context. Identified limitations regarding organizational scope and evaluation horizon point towards a research agenda centered on multiorganizational scalability and longitudinal validation.

This work is partially supported by UID/04466/2025 and UID/04516/2025 with the financial support of FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

Ontologies,Management,Printing,Organizations,Architecture,Computer architecture,Design methodology,Measurement,Context,OWL,Balanced Scorecard,Semantic Web Technologies,Ontology Engineering,Public Administration,Strategic Management,Knowledge Representation