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Performance measurement is not an end in itself. So why should public managers measure performance? Because they may find such measures helpful in achieving eight specific managerial purposes. As part of their overall management strategy, public managers can use performance measures to evaluate, control, budget, motivate, promote, celebrate, learn, and improve. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all eight purposes. Consequently, public managers should not seek the one magic performance measure. Instead, they need to think seriously about the managerial purposes to which performance measurement might contribute and how they might deploy these measures. Only then can they select measures with the characteristics necessary to help achieve each purpose. Without at least a tentative theory about how performance measures can be employed to foster improvement (which is the core purpose behind the other seven), public managers will be unable to decide what should be measured.
Everyone is measuring performance.1 Public managers are measuring the performance of their organizations, their contractors, and the collaboratives in which they participate. Congress, state legislatures, and city councils are insisting that executive-branch agencies periodically report measures of performance. Stakeholder organizations want performance measures so they can hold government accountable. Journalists like nothing better than a front-page bar chart that compares performance measures for various jurisdictions-whether they are average test scores for the city's schools or FBI uniform crime statistics for the state's cities. Moreover, public agencies are taking the initiative to publish compilations of their own performance measurements (Murphey 1999). A major trend among the nations that comprise the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, concludes Alexander Kouzmin (1999) of the University of Western Sydney and his colleagues, is "the development of measurement systems which enable comparison of similar activities across a number of areas," (122) and which "help to establish a performance-based culture in the public sector" (123). "Performance measurement," writes Terrell Blodgett of the University of Texas and Gerald Newfarmer of Management Partners, Inc., is "(arguably) the hottest topic in government today" (1996, 6).
Why Measure Performance?
What is behind all of this measuring of performance? What do people expect to do with the measures-other than use them to beat up on some underperforming agency, bureaucrat, or contractor? How are people actually using these performance...