ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

Understanding Goal Formation in Strategic Public Management

Public Management Review (John Bryson)

Organizational goals lie at the heart of strategic public management. While research has centered on the performance impact of organizational goals and goal clarity, the field remains unclear on where organizational goals come from and how they form over time.

When’s the Best Time for States to Adopt Evidence Based Budgeting?

Governing 

It’s just as important when revenues are robust as it is in tough fiscal times to base spending decisions on what works. This article describes how to get started.

Disaggregating is King

Barrett & Greene

Michael Jacobson, director of Performance and Strategy at the King County Office of Performance Strategy and Budgets pointed us to an adage he once heard: “Aggregate to communicate and disaggregate to manage.”

Resource of the Week:  City of Phoenix: City Manager’s Performance Dashboard

The City Manager’s Performance Dashboardwas created to provide the public with comprehensive, easy-to-understand information about the City of Phoenix. It includes over 130 key performance indicators across strategic areas and general government services that measure the city’s health. 

The ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance has been targeted by scammers! If you get a text congratulating you as a recipient of a CAP award and to call a certain person and number to claim “a total cash award of $4,500” then please ignore it! . . . You’ll be asked to provide personal details to “prove your identity” so you can get your payment.  Actually, this will lead to you being a further victim of identify theft! . . . . CAP does give out prestigious awards – each Spring – but there is no cash associated with the awards, and we know who they are being given to!

Performance Measurements Can Help Programs. It Can Also Hurt Them

IBM Center for The Business of Government (Barrett & Greene)         

In the decades that we’ve researched state and local government management, we’ve often written about the critical ways in which performance measurement can improve the delivery of services and the accomplishment of program goals. But . . . .

Rethinking Monitoring and Evaluation in Complex Systems

UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit

We have learned that using systems and portfolio approaches requires very different ways of doing monitoring, evaluation, and results measurement. Four issues are worth noting.

22 Mayors from North and South America Join City Data Alliance

Bloomberg Cities Network

Mayors around the world marshaled data in new ways to spot outbreaks, target testing and vaccination campaigns, address inequalities, monitor hospital capacity, advocate for resources, tailor masking and lockdown policies, and communicate with the public. There’s little doubt that the dynamic capabilities mayors and their teams built to analyze and act on key metrics in real-time saved lives. Now, some of the cities around the world using data most effectively to serve their residents are ready to see how they can scale their efforts.

Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy: Key Findings from 2021 Survey

OECD Reinforcing Democracy Initiative

This report presents the main findings of the first OECD cross-national survey of trust in government and public institutions, representing over 50,000 responses across 22 OECD countries.

Resource of the Week:  Honor Roll of State Grant Programs That Define and Prioritize Evidence of Effectiveness

Results for America

This honor roll recognizes state grant programs in select issue areas — such as education, health, and public safety – that clearly define evidence of effectiveness when they invite applications from potential grantees and prioritize such evidence when selecting service providers.

The Committee Watching Over Pandemic Funds Spending

RouteFifty

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, or PRAC, is behind what is arguably the nation’s largest data analytics project and has worked directly with state and local governments since the early months of the pandemic. The committee is evaluating spending from more than 400 programs across more than 40 agencies and establishing several valuable databases for practitioners and other transparency stakeholders. Last week, the PRAC launched a new dashboard tracking spending from the $350 billion Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund.

OMB Highlights Progress on President’s Management Agenda

Federal News Network

The Office of Management and Budget, in an update to Performance.gov on Friday, outlined targets agencies met in the third quarter of fiscal 2022 to empower the federal workforce and deliver a higher standard of customer service to the public.

San Francisco Data Spreads, Becomes a Model

Government Technology

Joy Bonaguro launched the San Francisco Data Academy during her time with the city. Now as California’s chief data officer, she’s expanding and improving the model to support agency-level analytics.

 

Steve Ballmer Is Building a “Moneyball” for Government

New York Times

In 2014, Ballmer created an early version of USAFacts, a website that set out to answer his own questions about the way American government works — and doesn’t work. . . . Eight years on, USAFacts is a nonprofit group that now produces an annual report on the state of the country,

Federal Funds Helping Cities Build Long-Term Data Capacity

CitiesToday

As well as supporting individual projects related to public safety, affordable housing, education and economic development, historic federal funds are also helping cities and states to build their capacity in using data to improve performance and transparency.

Resource of the Week:  Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker

National League of Cities, Brookings Metro & National Association of Counties

The Local Government American Rescue Plan Act Investment Tracker is an online resource that compiles information from local governments to offer a detailed picture of how large cities and counties (with populations of at least 250,000) are deploying ARPA State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund dollars. 

Collaborative Networks: The Next Frontier in Data-Driven Management

 IBM Center for The Business of Government (Julia Carboni, et al)

This report introduces the concept of network referral technology and shows how this technology can enable service providers to develop workflows within networks, improving organizational performance and client outcomes. . . . 

The insights in this report are supported by a case study of 11 AmericaServes networks. AmericaServes is a coordinated system of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that work together to serve veterans and transitioning service members and their families.

State Department Releases Its First Learning Agenda

U.S. Department of State

The Department plans to answer these eight ambitious questions between 2022 and 2026, including: “How can the Department utilize performance management and evaluation data and data systems to improve decision-making?”

Build Better Management Systems to Put Your Data to Work

Harvard Business Review

Practically everyone’s job involves using, interpreting, and creating data. Yet somehow this seems to get lost at all levels of organizations — the structure, the culture, the people. . . . and because data tend to be hidden, in customer orders, logistics, and management reports, the power of the status quo prevails.

Commonwealth Leaders Endorse Government Performance Principles

Commonwealth Secretariat

More than 200 top civil servants from across the Commonwealth wrapped up their biennial meeting in June by adopting an outcome document that underscores the importance of implementing the Generally Accepted Performance Principles to enhance government performance.

Namibia to Adopt Commonwealth’s Performance Improvement Software

Commonwealth Secretariat

Over 100 Political Office Bearers from Namibia, including cabinet ministers, briefed on Government Performance Management ahead of the country implementing the Commonwealth’s state-of-the-art SMART software

Designing and Testing a Nudge vs. a Boost

Behavioral Scientist

Changing behavior is challenging, so behavioral scientists and designers better have a large toolkit. Nudges—subtle changes to the choice environment that don’t remove options or offer a financial incentive—are perhaps the most widely used tool. But they’re not the only tool. There are also Boosts, which empower individuals to better exert their own choices.

Resource of the Week:  World Bank’s Global Governance Practice

The Governance Global Practice supports client countries to build capable, efficient, open, inclusive, and accountable institutions. . . . Countries with strong institutions are more resilient, are better able to facilitate private sector growth, reduce poverty, deliver valuable services, and earn the confidence of citizens.