Performance Management in Africa

I recently came across a seedling of performance management in Africa of all places through the Africa Public Service Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Forum. The only presence that they currently have is on Facebook but I encourage anyone interested to follow them online and assist in informing the discussion. It would be interesting if Africa became a hotbed of performance management discussion.

Software as a Service (SaaS) for Performance Management - Part 2

This is the second of a two-part post about Software as a Service (SaaS) for performance management. In the first part I provided an introduction to SaaS, defined what it is and touched on some of its applications to performance management. In this second part I'll detail the various benefits of SaaS including but not limited to cost-effectiveness, reliability, and ease of deployment.

SaaS Benefits

Here are the benefits of SaaS for Performance Management:

• Cost-Effective and Affordable

• Secure and Reliable

• Easy to Deploy

• Easy to Learn

• Low-Risk Investment

• Simple and Scalable

• Controls Costs

Cost-Effective and Affordable

How would a busy agency support a sophisticated technology used to manage its performance? They could rely on a SaaS vendor to maintain the technology for them. SaaS is the easiest way for government agencies that use technology to manage performance to get up and running quickly. All they need is a Web browser. For a low subscription cost, workers can enter, monitor and report on performance metrics using a Web browser. The public has Web-based access to reports. The agency has no server costs and no backups to maintain locally.

Secure and Reliable

Because SaaS vendors serve many clients, they invest more resources than a typical government agency in equipment and expertise to maintain reliability and security. Many SaaS providers leverage co-location datacenters, which offer highly secure, redundant hosting environments and off-site back-up systems. These are often “greener” solutions through the use of server virtualization and multi-tenant applications. Most SaaS providers offer service level agreements with information about privacy and data security, including: the physical security of servers and data, redundancy, back-up services, network security, and the location of the servers (hosting the application from at least two sites prevents loss of service in case of a fire, power outage, loss of Internet connectivity or other issues that typically cause a disruption in service).

Easy to Deploy

By leveraging cloud computing, SaaS applications can be turned on as needed because there is no client-side infrastructure to buy, install, configure, or maintain. When users log in they see what they need based on their role in the system, and the administrator simply adds new users by creating a new account.

Easy to Learn

SaaS helps government centralize information while distributing control. Instead of manually gathering metrics in separate formats, the information is entered in a consistent manner into a central repository. Workers and the public have role-based access to appropriate data and reports. They are empowered at the proper level with the needed data.

Low Risk Investment

Because SaaS-based solutions deliver service online and have a common code base, the setup and implementation for an agency is minimal. An agency can essentially test the service without a significant outlay of capital and time.

Simple and Scalable

The SaaS application can be rolled out to a few users or departments at a time. Once others are ready they can easily be added to the system. Since the SaaS provider developed the system capabilities they make the updates available to all customers, not just the ones that reported the issue.

Controls Costs

The greatest benefit for customers is the ability to control costs. The estimated price for an installed enterprise solution for a large government agency is more than 1/2 million dollars with at least 1 year implementation time, plus annual line items for support agreements, dedicated full-time employees (providing support), and hardware costs. With SaaS, the customer is able to start small and have a solution up and running in a matter of weeks. In addition there is a predictable amount to pay each year (usually paid monthly).

The Real Opportunity Is Change

Transforming today’s challenges into opportunities requires smart leadership and strategic use of technology to save time and money while capturing performance metrics that will allow an organization to improve over time. A reliable software as a service provider that specializes in and understands the unique needs of the Performance Management environment can help government produce better results today at a fraction of the cost of enterprise software. Performance management software costs should never be a deterrent in developing your jurisdiction's program.

Software as a Service (SaaS) for Performance Management - Part 1

This is the first of a two-part post about Software as a Service (SaaS) for performance management. In the first part I'll provide an introduction to SaaS, define what it is and touch on some of its applications to performance management. In the second part I'll detail the various benefits of SaaS including but not limited to cost-effectiveness, reliability, and ease of deployment.

The race is on for Government to focus on results, but the race is long and difficult because the path is rot with challenges. New technologies promise transformation of performance management processes, a great opportunity, indeed, but often at a high cost with a long implementation timeframe. SaaS solutions offer a cost effective way to simpler performance management implementation.

Municipalities, large and small, need to discover Software as a Service (SaaS) — referred to by some as applications that live in “the cloud”, Web-based, online, or on-demand as a way to save time and money without sacrificing the basic tenants of performance management: Results, Relevancy, Transparency, Timeliness, and Accuracy. SaaS also brings applications under a single platform, making it easier to implement performance management programs as well as an improved ability to benchmark across jurisdictions. SaaS is a technology trend that promises to provide a simpler solution for implementing performance management programs.

SaaS Defined

SaaS, on-demand, and cloud computing have become common terms in the technology world. In one way or another, they refer to the growing trend of software vendors providing their applications over the Web as a service, rather than as a set of code to install on a local server or desktop computer. Some actually provide both solutions. With SaaS, customers tap into one code base that is refined and enhanced (producing better results for the users) based on feedback from all users. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Organizations and/or individuals subscribe to the service and access it using a computer, laptop or even their mobile phone. These applications are known as on-demand, Cloud-based, Web-based, or online. Cloud computing is used by many SaaS providers and refers to massive server farms that host applications online for many customers. Cloud computing enables flexible processing power and storage capacity to scale up or down, depending on actual usage.

Almost everyone who uses the Internet today has used SaaS. Email programs such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail are examples of SaaS. What is really nice is that there is nothing to download or install, users simply create an account and log in through a Web browser. Popular social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter operate using a SaaS model.

SaaS as a Government Performance Management Tool

SaaS is ideal for government seeking technology solutions to help them implement performance management programs. Because these programs often encompass many disparate agencies/divisions that can geographically span hundreds or thousands of miles, it is useful to have a centralized, common technology platform that many users can share. In the event that some users are outside of your network, SaaS allows users to access your performance management data and application from anywhere. SaaS offers both simplicity and a cost-effective solution for government users.

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.

The Future of Performance Management

I was at an AGA breakfast a few months ago and the point was raised that people in government had been talking about performance management for "some time", with few results. It got me to thinking abut whether there is a future in performance management and what it might look like. A couple of publications I recently read struck me as two different thoughts on where we're headed in this field, one being an "academic" piece on performance management and the other more grounded in practical approaches. The first was a point/counterpoint look at the history of performance management (largely using examples from New York city) and how it might inform better practices in municipal management around the country. The counterpoint in the article focuses on some of the failures at the Federal level in creating a useful performance measurement framework. The authors, Dennis Smith and Beryl Radin, have a largely academic debate which at times gets muddled in teasing out the nuances of performance "management" vs. "measurement". But generally speaking it's a good article with a few highlights that I took from it:

1. Cities like New York took decades getting to an effective performance management program so we shouldn't be too hard on cities that don't get it right away.
2. In the case of New York, moving from an input/output focused metrics to outcome based measures seem to be the turning point where measuring performance becomes effective.
3. Local efforts seem to have been more effective than national efforts in this space.

There's a lot more to the article and it must be purchased from JPAM, but it's an excellent piece.

The other is a series published by the Urban Institute called "Legislating for Results" and offers a framework not only for performance management within individual agencies, but also a more broad plan for managing an entire jurisdiction. What I liked about the series is that it's a practical, step-by-step guide to getting results from government (in contrast to more academic approaches in other pieces). One of the nuances that Urban employs in the series is using the term "information" synonymously with metrics/measures. In fact, what we're looking for from performance measures is actually nothing more than information, and the Urban plan emphasizes providing quality information to government decisions makers in the hope of improving outcomes. My main problem with the piece is that there are many moving parts and it incorporates budgeting, communicating to the media, etc. into the framework. As a whole the series is a little too much, but I see most of the value from the three pieces on getting the right information, getting quality information, and using that information for planning purposes.

From the two pieces I got that there are clearly failures in performance management, but also some successes. Additionally, even though some academics have been talking about performance measures and management for "some time", the approaches are under constant revision and dare I say, improving. The important thing is to continue to push for jurisdictions to use performance measures, and to assist those with existing performance management programs to constantly improve them.

Where Are the Performance Metrics in the Recovery Act?

About a month and a half ago, OMB released the Federal reporting requirements for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It's taken me a little while to look through the requirements, and I had read that the focus was on job creation, but I was still a little surprised at the lack of Federal interest in other performance metrics. It pretty much boiled down to "# of jobs created" and a fairly standard set of financial data points entailing how the funds were spent. The Federal government has always been a laggard in requiring its own agencies to adopt strong performance management practices, but it didn't seem out of the question that in doling out hundreds of billions of dollars they would put together a few other metrics to make jurisdictions more accountable. At the very least it would have gotten towns, cities, and counties in the habit of reporting performance data, and possibly start some of them down the road of a more substantial performance management program. Lets hope that future rounds of government reporting requirements contain a more diverse set of measures, or at least let jurisdictions name their own. It's one step toward a more ingrained culture of government performance management.

Using Performance Metrics to Manage

In the final installment on a performance management framework, we'll look at using performance metrics and analysis in order to effectively manage agencies and their programs by using remediation and corrective actions. We've already covered the first and second steps, and will focus on the final two in this posting (all four are listed just below):

1. Report performance metric data on pre-defined schedule.

2. Analyze data for troubling trends or missed targets. Operationally research root cause(s) of problems.

3. Provide corrective action for metrics where target was missed or data is trending in wrong direction.

4. Repeat process for next reporting period.

Assuming that reliable metrics have been gathered and reported, and that data trends have been analyzed, an agency should have a good idea about where it stands operationally. The question then becomes how best to use the new information. For example, if I'm an FEMS agency that knows my emergency response times are trending in the wrong direction, and I know that the problem lies somewhere in my call center, what's the next step? (I'll answer this in a minute.) Given the diversity of agency missions that exist within any government, it would be impossible to give specific guidelines on how to fix troubling trends. For the purpose of our framework, however, the important thing is that the information is used to formulate some plan of action, and that the plan of action is clear, has timelines, and is documented for future consideration. Maintaining documentation of attempted corrective actions can be particularly helpful when there are several options for remediation. Each option can be tried over a given reporting period and performance data can be tracked. If there is some improvement in the numbers, the corrective action was likely effective; if there is little or no improvement according to the data, then another option on the list may be your best bet. The important thing in documenting the remediation is not to spin your wheels by proposing the same corrective action repeatedly and expecting a different outcome with each successive attempt.

Going back to our emergency response example in which we assume that the call center has been identified as the source for deteriorating response times, there may be multiple options to improve performance, including additional training, process re-engineering, etc. There may not be an obvious "best" remedial option, but the important thing is to pick one and continue to track response times. If additional training was implemented but the trend is not reversed in response times, then lack of training can be eliminated as both the cause of the problem as well as a corrective action. Continue the cycle of capturing and reporting the metrics, but with a different corrective action this time. Perhaps the response process is streamlined or adjusted and overall times improve. We then have some indication that our proposed solution had a positive effect on the operations that we are tracking. Through trial and error in the corrective action process, while concurrently continuing to track and report data, any agency can improve effectiveness in its operations.

The important takeaway from this exercise is that in order to demonstrate marked improvement in any public sector operation or program, all steps in the framework that we've outlined here (and in past postings) must be followed. Tracking and reporting metrics without proposing and documenting remediation in trouble spots won't bring about the change in negative outcomes that most agencies are seeking. The feedback loop of track-report-remediate-repeat is the fundamental process behind our performance management framework, and is essential in solving government inefficiencies.