The "Fear" of Performance Management

In a discussion with a colleague recently the topic of why more governments don't have an active performance management program came up. I will admit that the discussion was more speculative than scientific, but we generally agreed that many jurisdictions and agencies likely don't implement performance management programs out of fear of both what they might find as well as how the data that is reported might be used against them (the remainder of non-practitioners likely have no idea what it means!). There are stories of early meetings of CompStat in New York city in which supervisors were skewered based on crime stats in their area (although later accounts suggested a softening in the tone), and perhaps this is what government managers reference when thinking about reasons not to further performance management programs. But anyone focused on that aspect is ignoring the second part of that story which is the potentially positive impact of programs like CompStat. 

New York city has one of the lowest violent crime rates and the lowest property crime rate of large cities in the US. This is in stark contrast to the late 80s when it had one of the highest. The rates dropped precipitously throughout the 1990s, around the same time that CompStat came into being. While this relationship may very well be spurious, I imagine that the new management style in the police department had at least SOME effect on crime outcomes. I use CompStat as an isolated case of one agency's efforts, but it would be an interesting exercise to look at cities and states with advanced performance management programs (Atlanta, Albaquerque, and North Carolina spring to mind) and analyze the short and long term impacts of those programs both socially and politically. The reason this might be helpful is that it would be informative to cities who "fear" such programs in demonstrating the long term value of these programs. Certainly there are painful short term realizations of inefficiencies that would be made from better data and analysis but several case studies on improved outputs might put those fears to rest.

Citizen Awareness of Government Performance Measures

One aspect of the performance reporting cycle that I don't see discussed much is the role of the citizen in holding governments accountable for tax dollars. There are often waves of citizen anger over an isolated project or issue that is a lightning rod for criticism of government waste, but few groups seem to focus on the need for evaluating the performance of governments as a whole. A quick google search of "citizens for government accountability" did not seem to yield much in the way of citizens interested in government performance metrics (but did reveal a lot of anger about other issues!). There are some organizations that I have mentioned in previous posts with an interest in this area, but they are more academic than citizen-focused (I forgot to mention in previous posts the Performance Institute who offers a tremendous array of workshops and forums on government performance).

Ultimately I believe that the success or failure of government performance management in the public sector will be attributable to citizen engagement in the topic. Many people have grown used to easily finding out about crime statistics in a given neighborhood and would certainly notice if the resource was taken away. It will be interesting to see if that will translate to ensuring that their trash was collected, that equipment at the local park is full operational, or that the number of potholes in the streets are going down and not up. A notable paper by the Urban Institute addressed this point back in 2000 but it would be nice to see an update in this area. Most experts will admit that performance measurement has improved a great deal in the last 10 years, but the real question might be whether or not the average citizen cares, and if not, what will the impact on this area of government be in the future?

(as an aside, I'm simultaneously writing this post and watching a special on Federal attempts to clean up the Chesapeake and other waterways. It led me to the EPAStat quarterly report which unfortunately doesn't tell me if the fish or crabs are coming back to the estuary, but does tell me how many Chesapeake Bay Significant Discharge Permits were issued. With uninformative data like this there's no wonder it's hard to engage people in performance management.)

Will new Federal CIO, CTO Change Performance

There are several new faces in DC and it will be interesting to see what their impact on Federal performance management will be. The previous announcement of the Vivek Kundra as the nation's CIO was followed up with this week's announcement that Aneesh Chopra will be the nation's CTO and Jeffrey Zients will be the nation's Chief Performance Officer. This is a high-powered team of professionals that has worked in the city, state, and private sector and have been tasked to work together on bringing accountability back to the Federal government. My hope is that they will take a performance metric approach to accountability and ensure that agencies in the Federal government have a comprehensive performance plan which will be used to analyze effectiveness. I will post articles and comments on their progress moving forward.

Benchmarking Within a State

I mentioned in a previous post the attempts by ASCA to come up with benchmarking measures within the Corrections industry. There are several other groups attempting to benchmark data points within an industry (see HSRI Core Indicators for one example), but a couple of states have focused on a more intra-state approach to benchmarking across all government areas, but within the state. North Carolina and Florida have both embarked on projects to define metrics across jurisdictions in their states for the purpose of benchmarking against each other over time. It will be interesting to see if there is any consolidation among the varying groups attempting to come up with common performance metrics, be they state, industry, or professional organizations/commissions (such as the Performance Management Commission). While it may make sense to take from each group relevant measures, it may not be feasible to incorporate all of them for fear of drowning agencies in performance measurement reporting.