Measuring Government Performance: Researcher Says More Tools Will Encourage Governments to Get Started

Kenneth A. Smith, Ph.D., CPA, teaches performance reporting, measurement and management at Willamette University in Salem, OR, and has conducted research studies involving more than 400 state and city performance reports. He is also the co-chair of the Assessment Committee of the Oregon Progress Board, Secretary of the Oregon Public Performance Measurement Association and a member of the Advisory Committee for Public Performance Measurement & Reporting Network. Smith, who is academic adviser to AGA’s SEA Program, agreed to talk with AGA about the state of performance reporting today and the outlook for the future.

Q: How did you become interested in government performance reporting? Actually, I started my Ph.D. in accounting at the University of Missouri in 1992, when GASB published an Exposure Draft and Osborne and Gaebler’s book, Reinventing Government, had come out. My interest came out right at the beginning. I was interested in performance reporting because it was about more than just the numbers, we were looking at evidence-based numbers to really inform something deeper. It was about providing services and how they can be improved and how organizations could work together to perform better.

Q: What’s your background? Have your worked in government? I worked with nonprofit organizations in accounting and also as an auditor. I worked for three years as a CPA and the majority of my clients were government entities. I’ve been at Willamette University since 2004.

Q: Tell me about what you do at Willamette. We actually have a really interesting program. We have an MBA, which is the only business or management degree we offer. I teach in the Atkinson Graduate School of Management. Our MBA is accredited by both business and governmental/nonprofit accrediting agencies (one of only two in the world). It’s a holistic approach. We call it “cross-sectoral,” and take an interdisciplinary approach to our teaching since we believe the challenges of management are pretty similar regardless of ownership. Our campus address is State Street, so I easily walk over to meet with professional colleagues at the Departments of Human Services, Transportation and the Oregon Progress Board.  Our broad approach to teaching is similar to the broad skills needed in order to do performance measurement, reporting and management.

Q: For those governments that are just thinking about performance reporting, how would you convince them that it is the right thing to do? I think the main question—and it’s what I do research on—is whether or not they’ll do it if it’s not required. No one wants to talk about that. A lot of people are opposed to mandatory reporting for a lot of good reasons, so currently it’s voluntary for state and local governments. The question centers on, for the lack of a better term, professionalism. If a leader in a government agency wanted to be the best they could be, to run their organization in the most responsible way for their constituents—employees as well as citizens—it’s hard for me to imagine a professionally run, professionally managed organization that No. 1 does not capture and understand the data about their performance and No. 2 does not share that with a large number of stakeholders.

Q: Why aren’t more governments reporting on performance? There are lots of reasons. First of all, it’s difficult. Second, there’s also fear that if someone engages in measuring and reporting performance there will be unfair, negative consequences in the media. But I’ve looked at that. One of my studies reported in AGA’s Journal shows that most of the coverage was frequent, fair and favorable, with the caveat that governments had already established a good relationship with the press. A third and perhaps biggest reason why governments don’t do performance reporting is there are just too few resources and time to do it.

Q: If you were a government official, how would you reach out to citizens? That’s not my primary area, but a lot of great work is being done by Barbara Cohn Berman of The Fund for the City of New York’s Center on Government Performance (http://www.fcny.org/fcny/cgp/) and the National Center for Civic Innovation (http://www.civicinnovation.org/gov_perf.html). The No. 1 thing to understand is citizens have different views of things. They don’t care about internal structures. I don’t like the view of “the customer” at all times, but the customer at a restaurant doesn’t care about whose job it is to make sure the silverware is clean and the food is hot, they just want it to be done. Citizens tend to view the world very differently than we view our organizational structures.

Q: How should a government use benchmarks? Well, I think benchmarking is a poorly understood word—people often mean different things and this leads to confusion. When I use the term, I mean organizations that work to find the best level of performance that they could strive to attain, and then set out to understand the processes and the activities that allow an organization to perform very well. I think it’s better to use benchmarking as a forum for continuous learning, rather than as a mechanistic way of making the numbers come out differently.

When you talk about benchmarking to compare one organization to another, that’s one style of benchmarking, but I would just call that “comparing.” There’s a fear of unjust comparisons. It’s a big unsolved problem in performance reporting and it’s extremely complicated to do comparisons in a productive manner. Thoughtless comparisons can do more hard than good. To do comparisons well takes a lot of time and energy. The North Carolina Benchmarking Project is fantastic, but it took a lot of energy and support.

Q: You received a grant from the Academy for Government Accountability. Explain the project that was funded. We’re in the process of getting close to concluding it. It will have two pieces—and was an extension of an earlier study that was funded by Willamette University. The first study looked at how 200 state agencies do performance reporting. The results of that are in the AGA Journal. The first new study funded by the Academy looks at how 200 city agencies do performance reporting.  The second new study examines how to locate performance reports at city websites—and it is not very easy. These studies will be publicly available in 2009. The main takeaway on the state and city agency reports is the quality of performance reporting is not very good except in very rare circumstances. This is a surprise to some people who have been working in this area a long time.

It’s hard to be too complimentary about the grant funding. It helps to get work done much more quickly. So that program is just really, really valuable and AGA should be commended for doing it. I received $9,900. The vast majority of it pays for very smart, highly motivated graduate students who are able to work long and hard hours collecting and examining the performance reports. It is tedious at times, but very useful to know what is really happening.

Q: How do you think AGA’s SEA program should grow? I think AGA’s Performance Management Conference in Seattle was quite successful and I think it’s important for us to really celebrate success like that. I think we should reflect on a couple of things. One was that the maturity of the level of the conversation was quite high. People understand performance topics from a much more holistic, reasonable and rich way that helps us all as we move forward. The second piece I took away is that we clearly do not have enough support for the average government. The average government accountability professional, no matter where they sit, they do not have the kind of quick and easy support materials they need, even if they wanted to engage in performance reporting. So we’re looking to develop a website to provide detailed guidance based on the results of my research studies.

Q: What about the GASB criteria? The GASB criteria are what the AGA Certificate program is based upon, so that’s useful at the beginning level, but what it doesn’t give is start-to-finish examples. We are trying to give better and more useful examples and guidance about the choices that have to be made when putting together these reports. We need to facilitate and support these willing professionals. They just need better tools and guidance on how to do it quickly and easily.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add? Performance reporting is worthwhile from a professional perspective and as with any professional activity, there are judgments required, but we need a richer set of guidance and tools. I think that’s why we’re not at a high level of quality—we just haven’t developed the “preparer-friendly” tools yet. We’ve made great progress but we need useful tools to keep improving.

Finally, I blogged about performance reporting for AGA back on June 5.  One of my key themes there was the need for us to “ethically argue” about how to improve performance reporting. Please feel free to contact me via e-mail to engage in more discussion about these topics as I want to learn all I can.