A new book by Charles K. Bens, M.A. of Best Practice Consulting, focuses on the growing interest for the public sector to monitor more carefully how tax dollars are spent. For many reasons, both political and technical, performance measurements have not become an integral part of most governments' management or decision-making systems. That is starting to change. The threat of privatization and spending cutbacks, made without due consideration for impact of these changes in the future, has certainly helped increase the interest.
Bureaucrats are anxious to prove the value of the programs and services they provide.
Employees are anxious to preserve their jobs, and not be thrown to the private sector wolves or out of work completely. Politicians are keen to save their jobs as well. The missing ingredient in this quest for better performance measurement of the public sector has consistently been how to do it. Measuring the performance of a government service or program involves much more than simply taking out a ruler to determine how much something costs, how long it takes or whether it was done well or not. Certainly, these are all factors, but what about the context for this measurement effort.