The Hidden Cost of Performance Management

Public Performance & Management Review (Suho Ji et al)

Performance management can have unintended dysfunctional consequences. When faced with performance appraisals, organizations often reduce their efforts on unmeasured performance dimensions, a phenomenon known as effort substitution. Adopting a behavioral perspective, we propose that an organization’s past performance shapes its current behaviors, including dysfunctional ones.

Using AI to Transform Fraud Prevention in State Government

RouteFifty

Modern, AI-powered grants management systems, tailored to meet the unique needs of state agencies, offer a powerful combination of fraud prevention, process automation, and data-driven oversight—helping states protect taxpayer dollars while maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of grant programs.

“Death” of Performance History

Barrett & Greene

As time passes, we’ve become increasingly aware that many of the leaders in state and local government come up with ideas they think are brand new, without digging into the files, or talking to people who preceded them, to see whether their notions are really new or just a retread of something that’s been tried before.

How Does Performance Budgeting Affect Use of Performance Information?

International Review of Administrative Sciences (Malul Azam and Geert Bouckaert)

Studies on performance-based budgeting (PBB) suggest that, despite sustained reform efforts, stakeholders continue to make only limited use of performance information (PI) in budgetary decision-making. This case study of Indonesia indicates that PBB reforms have moderately strengthened the use of PI in the budgeting process, more so for control and learning purposes than for accountability.

Roadmap for Agile Evidence Building

Government Executive

 The current model of federal evidence building is outdated. It’s too slow for today’s policy environment, too expensive to justify in a time of fiscal restraint and too removed from the real-time decisions that drive public impact. But the answer is not to abandon evaluation. Rather, we must embrace a new model—one that is faster, cheaper and purpose-built for action. This new model is “agile evidence building.”

Trump’s War on Measurement

ProPublica

The federal government collects, organizes, and shares data that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and informs judgements of business leaders, school administrators, and medical providers nationwide. However the survival of these data is in doubt because of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Resource of the Week:  Futures, Foresight and Horizon Scanning Toolkit

UK Cabinet Office

This Toolkit helps you develop policies and strategies that are robust in the face of an uncertain future. It updates and builds on a version published in 2017 by the UK Cabinet Office. It includes a bank of case studies and resources with facilitator guides and templates for running workshops.