No matter how you measure performance: it's the results that count: GFOA research has identified six approaches that local gover

Performance measurement concepts and applications have grown in use and sophistication since 1943 when the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) first published a report on measuring municipal activities. Today in leading governments performance measures do not stand alone but are part of a comprehensive performance management approach for aligning goals, spending, service delivery, and results.

In a recent GFOA telephone survey, 40 percent of local governments surveyed said they have implemented organization-wide performance measurement. (1) While approaches and resources devoted to performance measurement and management vary widely, in the end these communities are making efforts to focus their resources more strategically through performance measurement and management.

The GFOA Performance Measurement and Management Initiative encompasses a variety of information and services. Resources include recommended practices on performance measurement; the budget awards program criteria, which encourage governments to integrate performance measures into budgets; training and publications on performance measurement; performance measurement and management consulting; and a major research project on the use of performance measurement and management by state and local governments. Based on surveys and interviews conducted as part of this research project, the GFOA's Research and Consulting Center has identified several categories of performance measurement and management systems being used by governments, as shown in Exhibit 1.

The strategic cascading approach and performance budgeting had the highest percentage of use among the approximately 520 jurisdictions (of nearly 1,300 interviewed) who met criteria for having organization-wide systems to measure and manage performance. Many jurisdictions use a combination of approaches. While each jurisdiction's approach has been designed to fit its unique needs, all of the jurisdictions we talked to have integrated performance measurement into their managerial processes to some extent. More information from the GFONs research is available on the GFONs Web site at www.gfoa.org/pm/.

The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, uses performance measures as part of a comprehensive managing for results initiative, "Results Matter" Performance measures and results are reported to the public on the city's Web page, the Citizen's Guide to the Budget (www.nashville.gov/citizens_budget), where citizens can access videos that explain the budget process and read news articles on the budget. The Metropolitan Government's Web site is intended to engage the public in an ongoing conversation about how the government is performing and what is actually being achieved. The city also developed the Citizen's Guide to Metro's Performance (www.nashville.org/performance), which accompanies the city's annual performance report and provides citizens with further information on how the city measures performance, how it is using performance information, and how well the city is achieving its priorities. Nashville uses a program-based budget format in an effort to emphasize results for customers. In the budget document, measures, goals, and results are presented by program with a narrative description of the expected outcome for the program's funding level. Typically, each department has several outcome measures and will present only the one, most important, key result measure for each program.

In addition, Nashville audits performance information to assure that measures are valid, that information is accurate, and that information is reported in a timely way. Through a performance measure certification process, the Office of Financial Accountability in the finance department produces a report for the mayor and council that identifies all measures as either certified or not certified, accompanied by an explanation. This report is presented during the budget process and helps assure the integrity of the Results Matter program.

Notes

(1.) Cities and counties with populations greater than 25,000 and 75,000, respectively, in a phone survey of approximately 1,300 governments. In an earlier GFOA Internet survey, approximately 60 percent of the respondents said their governments did some sort of organization-wide performance measurement. The GFOA's telephone survey used a narrower definition of organization-wide performance measurement than did the Internet survey

(2) This is the percentage of jurisdictions using each performance measurement system. These percentages are based on the 514 jurisdictions interviewed that are using an organization-wide performance measurement system.

JEFFREY SHELLHORN is a consultant/policy analyst with the GFOA's Research and Consulting Center in Chicago.

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