State Correctional Group Leading the Way In Performance Measurement

An excellent example of a national group attempting to standardize measures across an industry is the Association of State Correctional Administrators. They have an ambitious project titled the Performance Based Measures system that seeks to standardize measures within corrections through strict definitions and counting measures for actions such as assaults, accidents, health-related measures and many others. Information on the project can be found here.

I was fortunate to attend a training session for the program and I have to say that it was really impressive. The counting rules and definitions manual is thorough and fairly clear (and as thick as a dictionary) and can be found here. They even have a web-based tool for jurisdictions to enter their data. The biggest problem that I could tell from their efforts was the general lack of sophistication of a number of state and local corrections agencies. Several of the jurisdictions I talked to simply didn't have the data to fill out the requirements of the PBMS system.

Still, this could be a great starting point for other areas of government such as health care, human services, parks and recreation, etc. to set up their own set of performance measures. It will not be easy, though. The PBMS system was started in 2001 and took more than 6 years to finalize and get a production application running.