International Public Management Journal
Vol. 13, Issue 4, Pages 429 - 470
October 2010
Abstract
To produce better results, a number of public agencies and governmental jurisdictions have created their own PerformanceStat leadership strategies. The New York City Police Department created the original CompStat; then Baltimore adapted the concept to create CitiStat, the strategy's first application to an entire governmental jurisdiction. As implemented by these and other agencies and jurisdictions, PerformanceStat is primarily a top-down, hierarchical effort to improve the results produced by individual public agencies. Often, however, important results can only be produced through a collaboration of public agencies. This raises the question: Can a PerformanceStat leadership strategy be adapted to situations in which improving performance requires cross-agency or even cross-jurisdiction collaboration? And if so, how?
This article identifies the core concepts underlying PerformanceStat, suggests how they need to be modified to create a CollaborationStat strategy, reviews the public-management literature on traditional collaboration, examines two cases of intra-jurisdiction collaborations that have some of the features of CollaborationStat, offers some propositions suggesting the conditions under which such collaborators might choose to adopt a more formally structured CollaborationStat strategy, and distinguishes among (a) traditional PerformanceStat, (b) traditional collaboration, and (c) a collaborative, performance-focused leadership strategy that is distinctly different: “CollaborationStat.” A CollaborationStat approach could enhance both traditional PerformanceStat, by making performance a multi-agency responsibility, and traditional collaboration, by focusing the collaborators' efforts on producing results.
Citation
Behn, Robert. "Collaborating for Performance: Or Can There Exist Such a Thing at CollaborationStat?" International Public Management Journal 13.4 (October 2010): 429 - 470.