Each new resource offers both an opportunity for the future and a challenge for the present. These new resources represent the leverage we need to succeed in our relentless pursuit of ever-higher quality. They also force us to confront the issues of productivity. To succeed quality-wise, we must find additional savings from within our own shop to balance new project costs, enhance continuing programs and renovate and support existing plant, equipment and people. This may appear obvious to those who work in market-driven environments, but public universities are still learning how to construct real budgets that reflect institutional purpose and reward productivity and quality.
Public universities serve many masters and live only partially in a market economy.
Their internal and external economies provide conflicting and ambiguous signals. If we say we want productivity but reallocate most productivity savings to other units, if we insist on the importance of quality but reward individuals for longevity and if we focus on our outside competition but respond to our own internal political dynamics, we have problems generating the productivity and quality that our future demands. Over the past few years, the University of Florida has experimented with an analytical process designed to determine the principal elements of our internal economy and link them to the major indicators of our quality and success. Gathered under the name of the Florida Quality Evaluation Project, this comprehensive effort brings all of the university's revenue and expense streams into one matrix that links the productivity analysis to systematic benchmarks of quality. Two principal products have come from this effort.