In the last decade there has been an increasing effort to provide public utilities managers with planning and control tools, to take into account not only operational but also strategic issues. Among them are customer satisfaction, internal business process efficiency, business image, and bargaining power against other counterparts (e.g., the municipal administration). Often, however, such an effort has been oriented to generate a large volume of data, focused only on financial indicators and on a static view of the relevant system. This paper shows how the use of "dynamic" balanced scorecards can significantly improve the planning process in a strategic learning perspective. Insights from a project in a municipal water company are analysed and discussed.

Financial losses recorded in city bus companies often force managers to implement restructuring strategies aimed at improving business results. However, such decisions may not produce the expected consequences for a number of reasons. Both the internal and external environment in which such companies operate can make the design and implementation of long-term sustainable policies quite diffi cult. In fact, the result may be that decision makers introduce "effective" policies in a company subsystem, while ignoring the mediumand long-term implications of such decisions in the performance of the whole company. With the aim to detect the main causes underlying "myopic" fl eet maintenance policies, an empirical analysis of two major Italian city bus companies has been conducted. This approach allowed the authors to make explicit the network of cause-and-effect relationships between different business subsystems and to build a system dynamics model to support city bus managers in designing and assessing alternative long-term sustainable strategies.