Intro to Measures Matter

This blog is meant as a public discussion forum for anyone interested in sharing their thoughts on the topic of government performance metrics and management. Increased public oversight has called for greater use of metrics and data in evaluating the effectiveness of government agencies. The trend thus far has been a ground-up approach to the use of performance data as programs like CompStat in New York City, CityStat in Baltimore and CapStat in Washington DC have been successful in incorporating performance data into their operations. States and the Federal government have been slower to adopt performance management systems but the call for greater accountability of tax expenditures in the recent Federal stimulus package creates an excellent opportunity for advances in this area.

In addition, national initiatives to standardize metrics across municipalities such as the ICMA Center For Performance Measurement and the National Performance Management Advisory Commission have gained some momentum. The idea of having a standard set of well-defined measures for all public entities would provide the ability to benchmark across jurisdictions.

The struggle still lies in changing government culture, and convincing decision makers that this industry is no different from the private sector. While performance can't be rolled into the same ideas of expenses and profits, there are ways to objectively evaluate effectiveness in the public sector through a well thought out performance management plan. Public managers can make evaluate and determine corrective action based on metrics and data, not just conjecture and qualitative assessments.

I hope that you will join me in improving the discussion surrounding this area and will share this blog with your friends. Please feel free to post comments and if you think you would like to contribute to the blog feel free to contact me.