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Background
and Overview
When President Clinton
signed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) into law
on August 3, 1993, he was beginning what may be the most
comprehensive effort ever to change the traditional paradigm of
accountability in American government. For the last four and a
half years, executive branch agencies have been grappling with the
myriad of measurement problems that have emerged in the lead-up to
the first government-wide performance budget, submitted by the
President to the Congress in January 1998.
Ours is an era marked by public dissatisfaction with
government, by public demand for fiscal discipline, and by
movements to "reinvent" government along the lines of
private sector management reform. Policy makers are seeking tools
which will help them to govern with greater legitimacy. The latest
efforts to implement performance management still hold the
possibility of creating a new paradigm for accountability in
democratic governments, one which will allow bureaucrats
flexibility and creativity in return for meeting measurable goals
-- at a good price.
Nevertheless, there are significant obstacles to the
development of effective performance measures and to their use in
public sector management. Questions abound: questions
about measurement (how to determine the "right"
performance measures), management (how to use those measures to
actually change organizational behavior), political and systemic
questions (whether and how elected officials will use performance
management as a political and/or oversight tool). Fundamentally,
we must ask and answer the following questions: Can performance
measures be developed and used in ways that allow for large
increases in the efficiency and in the effectiveness of operations
in the public sector? Can innovative governmental organizations
also be accountable to elected officials and to the public?
Will the adoption of
performance management systems in government lead to an increase
in public confidence in government?
Shelley Metzenbaum, an
expert on performance management and former Associate
Administrator of EPA, is leading this Kennedy School effort to
engage and invest political decisions makers in particular in the
current movement for measuring and managing public-sector
performance. With the assistance of Kennedy School faculty members
Herman "Dutch" Leonard, Steve Kelman, Mark Moore and
Pete Zimmerman, the Visions Project will convene an Executive
Session on Performance Management, a carefully selected group of
high-level political decision makers, experts, businesspeople and
members of the media, to explore the ways in which performance
management can enhance the capacity of political decision makers.
The Executive Session meetings will be supplemented by a series of
practitioner forums -- workshops for civil servants oriented
around the types of transactions in which their agencies engage --
intended to both gather evidence and anecdotes to inform the work
of the Executive Session and to disseminate the results of its
deliberations.
The implications of this effort for public policy are
substantial. If performance management can become, through the
work of the Kennedy School and others, an effective means of
holding government organizations accountable, and if it can be
used by political decision makers to increase accountability to
the citizens, it will become a major element in restoring public
trust in government both here and abroad. It is at the center of
most concepts of twenty-first century government, and it holds out
the promise of a public sector with the vibrancy of the best in
the private sector.
For
more information, contact:
Shelley
Metzenbaum, Director
978-371-3099
Telephone 978-371-2335 Fax
Shelley_Metzenbaum@ksg.harvard.edu
Lynn
Akin, Project Coordinator
617-496-6844
Telephone 617-496-6033 Fax
Lynn_Akin@Harvard.edu
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Management Home Page
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