A Tale of Two Cities: How Different Performance Management Systems Use Citizen Feedback (Part 1)

There’s been a decades-long movement in the U.S. to increase citizens’ involvement in government, and for government services to be more citizen-centric. As a result, we expect to see such initiatives in cities across the U.S., but what about in China? Interestingly, there is a real commitment in some cities in China to listen, and respond, to their citizens.

Jonathan Walters

Jonathan Walters is a staff correspondent for Governing magazine. He has covered state and local public policy and administration for the past 20 years, writing on topics ranging from civil service reform to welfare reform.

States, Localities Inspire Federal Data-Driven Management

The New York City Police Department launched it vaunted CompSTAT more than a decade ago. This data-driven management approach inspired dozens of other cities and several states to adopt it to run their operations as well.

Is Performance Budgeting an Unnatural Act?

A couple of recent pieces of research may provide some insight-- and caution -- in attempts to implement performance budgeting.  The first piece looks at challenges raised internally within agencies by professional tensions between finance, performance, and budget personnel in cities in North Carolina, and the second piece looks at the perspectives of local elected officials in Denmark.

 

 

 

A budgetary "revolution" in France

The reform, popularly named LOLF after an August 1, 2001 constitutional amendment, defined a new architecture for the French state budget, articulated in terms of mission, programs and actions.   Unlike GPRA, it changes the entire budgetary process rather than adding results-oriented features to an otherwise unchanged process. 

Should We Create a Performance Management Framework?

OMB last month released a memo on its next steps on improving agency performance.  Rather than defining a government-wide, all-encompassing framework, it focuses on defining a framework for agency “high priority performance goals” and tra

Five Methods for Measuring Unobserved Events: A Case Study of Federal Law Enforcement

Measuring program performance is relatively straightforward in many areas of government, such as social services, visa processing, and air traffic control.  But there are instances where assessing performance and success is much harder.  One particularly difficult area involves law enforcement, where a key goal is to prevent or deter bad outcomes – which can often happen without the knowledge of law enforcement officials.

The Virginia Implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

These funds were accompanied by a new, centralized system of strict financial accountability and perfor­mance reporting, with frequent reporting requirements. These new requirements, as well as the rapid implementation time­frame required by the Recovery Act, created an enormous implementation challenge for all the participants in our federal-state-local-non­profit intergovernmental system.

Use of Dashboards in Government

Government leaders are deluged with thousands of streams of data about the performance of their agencies and programs.

One approach the Obama administration has latched onto to make sense out of the deluge of data is the use of on-line “dashboards” of performance data that track the key performance metrics of various federal agencies and programs.  The administration has touted the benefits of dashboards as a way of organizing and filtering performance data so it makes sense to decision makers so they can understand and act on it.

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