Sunday, April 19, 2009
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.
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This is more of an aside, versus a direct comment regarding the appointments you highlight. I hope for thoughtful accountability in government. This would include emphasis on understanding worse case consequences of accountability systems. To borrow an extreme example, consider the typist who is judged/rewarded by word count who cleverly leaves a book on the keypad during lunch (a high quantity low quality result). While this possibility just not justify abandoning the use of performance metrics, I am interested in learning more about how unintended outcomes can be avoided or at least minimized. -BH
ReplyDeleteExcellent point, and I believe it touches on two subjects. The first being the importance of "outcome" vs. "output" measures. I think many jurisdictions slowly transition from a largely output-based performance management system, the word count in your analogy, to one based on outcomes, such as completed reports or reports with a grade of "A". Something that is not concerned with the process, but rather the outcome of the process. Most systems related to citizen-based performance oversight deal strictly with outcomes, whereas operationally within a government agency there would be an interest in both outcomes and outputs.
ReplyDeleteThe second point is that invariably there will need to be independent auditing of performance metrics the same way that auditing exists for financial statements. Perverse incentives to mis-report performance data will require some oversight, but the rules for that are just now being formulated (see the GASB suggested criteria for performance reporting at http://www.agacgfm.org/performance/sea/downloads/Guidelines.pdf)