Updates on Recent and Upcoming Performance Management Events

It's been a little while, but I have a few upcoming posts on performance management. In the meantime, here are a few upcoming events that are of relevance in the government performance management realm:

The Community Indicators Consortium (CIC) holds its international conference in Bellevue, Washington this year on Oct 1-2. CIC is a great group and Ben Warner runs a great blog on Community Indicators for anyone interested in this area. Very similar to performance metrics and from a slightly more citizen-centric standpoint.

The Association of Government Accountants (or is it Accountability?) holds its Performance Management Conference on Nov 5-6 in Seattle, Washington. I plan to be there along with all the other party people involved in performance management.

If anyone made it to the ICMA conference this week, feel free to chime in with some comments. I missed it and am curious how prevalent performance was discussed.

Finally, the Performance Management Commission released its Performance Management Framework for public review and as expected, it's too long! Who's going to read this thing when it's more than 30 pages? It's too bad because there are a lot of great concepts in it. For anyone who doesn't have the time to read such a document, I still advocate my own framework.

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.