Tomorrow night at the city council I am unveiling my plans for performance oriented government.  Since you are kind enough to read this blog, I thought I would give you a heads up.

Performance measures in government have been quite the rage for the past ten or 15 years, ever since the publication of "Reinventing Government."  The theory is that by establishing performance measures, you challenge government to always improve and get more efficient.

For example, suppose you set as a performance measure that you want 75% of the potholes filled within 48 hours of the time someone calls them in.  (That, or something like it, will be a standard we will adopt.)

At the end of the year, you then measure how you did, and then try to improve and raise the bar.  Maybe your goal for the next year is to fill 90% within 48 hours.  Maybe your goal for the third year is that you have improved roadway maintenance so that the number of pothole calls have dropped.

The possibilities are endless.  In the fire department, your goal might be to respond to every working fire within 4 minutes.  In police, your goal might be to hold neighborhood meetings, or increase patrols in certain areas.  In the clerk's office, your goal might be to have a 90% customer satisfaction rate on your customer surveys.  In highway, we will set goals that downtown streets will be swept and cleaned every week, and a goal that 300 new trees will be planted. 

Different communities do this in different ways.  In Baltimore, performance measures are in a separate computer program called "Citistat".  Somerville and Amesbury have set up Citistat programs.

In other cities, like Cambridge, No. Andover and Chelsea, the performance goals are built into the budget of each department. 

In still other cities, like New York, department goals are posted on the web site where the city gives itself an on-line report card every year.  We are still experimenting and it is not clear which model we will eventually follow. 

The budget crisis we are undergoing is a permanent crisis, not a temporary one.  If we are going to get through this, and we will, we have to find ways to constantly improve government efficiency.  The best way to do that is by instituting government performance standards and then constantly upping the bar.

What standards would you like to see?  How can we improve?

Jim Fiorentini

You might have heard of CompStat. It was an approach used by the New York City police department to tackle crime through performance management. The approach is supported by a GIS based information system that help police and the Mayor identify crime hot spots and to track performance - but really it was about regular accountability meetings for senior managers to discuss that performance and identify solutions to tackle underperformance and praise good performance. (Occasionally the approach was criticised for having too much "accountabilty" and not enough recognition).

The City of Baltimore took CompStat one step further and came up with Citistat. This looks at local government performance as well as police performance (in most US cities, the police force is directly accountable to the head of local government). They have a lot of interesting information about their approach on the Baltimore CitiStat website (including new information on how neighbourhoods and even smaller communities can take advantage of some of the tools and approaches for improving quality of life). A couple of years ago, Baltimore's mayor, Martin O'Malley came to visit the City of Westminster as part of a Peer Review team.

The London Borough of Barnet uses the approach, too where it's called FirstStat - though I don't know much about it.

Now councils North of the Border are giving it a try.

From the Scottish Executive:

The Executive set up pilots of the Citistat performance management system in two NHS Boards, Tayside and Ayrshire & Arran, and two local authorities, City of Edinburgh and Aberdeen City. The pilots ran from September 2005 for six months. Findings from the evaluation of the pilots include:

• The model can be adapted to Scotland's public sector and can respond to local circumstances
• The process improves the quality of information and makes it easier to understand and scrutinise that information
• Improved quality of information and regular meetings to scrutinise performance allows active follow up, overseen by senior management, and better results

You can download the report here, which includes case studies from all four organisations.

Story via eGov Monitor
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As far as I know, few performance management systems feature in bestselling murder mysteries. But in Patricia Cornwell's novel Southern Cross a CompStat style PM IT system is an important part of the plot.

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