TOPICS
TOPICS
The Stat Approach
In September, the Office of Management and Budget released its final evaluation of the performance of federal programs. This was the last act of OMB's five-year-old PART endeavor, the catchy acronym standing for a clunky title: Performance Assessment Rating Tool. PART found that 80 percent of 1,017 federal programs were performing acceptably. The other 20 percent either could not demonstrate results or were judged to be failing.
The program, an important element of a serious Bush administration effort to focus on management, made great strides toward systematic performance measurement, although it never was embraced by Congress and so had little influence on budgeting decisions.
PART won the Harvard Kennedy School Innovations in American Government Award in 2005. This signaled that accountability, once the sine qua non of public management, had given way to performance as the holy grail, though I suppose one could argue that the latter is a subset of the former. The ascendance of performance had been telegraphed when the innovations awards crowd crowned Baltimore's CitiStat as a winner one year earlier.
CitiStat's principles have a longer, and more closely examined, history than PART, its ancestry tracking back to the CompStat program former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani started in New York City to identify and address high-crime locations. So, when invited by Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon to a conference about CitiStat, I thought I might pick up some lessons of interest to the federal management cadre.
The conference started off with an actual CitiStat weekly meeting, this one to examine the progress of CleanStat, Dixon's effort to enlist several city departments in meeting her priority goal of a "cleaner, greener, healthier and safer" Baltimore. "Grime and crime go together," said CitiStat's leader, deputy mayor Christopher Thomaskutty.
On the hot seat was Valentina Ukwuoma, head of the Solid Waste Bureau, and her deputies. Why, inquired the inquisitors, was the Poplar Grove area of the city, though targeted for increased city services, suffering from 65 overdue high grass and weed requests, 35 overdue cleaning requests, and 58 overdue forestry requests?" And why was one of eight graffiti-removal crews closing only 1.81 service requests per hour, while every other was above 2.5 and the highest was at 3.4?
Such questions underline the emphasis on objective statistics in the "stat" approach. And this level of street detail is what makes CitiStat work in Baltimore's 80 square miles. But, one wondered, how would it translate one or two levels up in the federalist scheme?
The beginnings of an answer are coming out of Maryland's capital, where Gov. Martin O'Malley, who invented the CitiStat program while serving as mayor of Baltimore, is now striving to install State-Stat in Annapolis. At the conference, O'Malley and a top aide, Matt Gallagher, voiced frustration with slow progress at the state level. Departmental secretaries were not used to providing details about their agencies' performance, and as Gallagher observed, it's difficult to hold a single agency accountable for such goals as mitigating pollution in the Chesapeake Bay or ensuring a child's well-being. Still, as meetings with secretaries progress, the governor's expectations become clear: Programs need to measure and im-prove their performance, and their leaders will be held to strict account.
At the federal level, these challenges are compounded. Few agencies can claim they are solely responsible for social, environmental or other outcomes. But the insistence by O'Malley and Dixon that agencies do better, and the personal time they invest in this pursuit, offer examples that the next president and leaders of Congress could follow if they're seriously interested in pursuing the goal of a high-performing government.
COMMENTS
- Can you imagine one of our federal SESers sitting through an esxamination like the Ukwuoma endured? Me, either. Today's federal execs are focused on keeping power, not being accountable. And the "citistat"--an apparent outgrowth of the decades-old Activity Based Costing method, will be stoutly resisted in federal circles, too. Let Obama try his best. Unless he compels performance, as W did with his excellent PART, we will sit for 4 years through many meetngs and rousing pep talks with little improvement to show for it, as we did in the last Administration. PART clunky? It brought accountability to government in a way nothing else has. Let's hope BHO changes its brand, but keeps the idea. Ron Posted November 26, 2008 8:42 AM
- An excellent article on several counts. It is tragic that the PART process initiated by OPM "never was embraced" on Capitol Hill, due in large part to concerns that any searching assessments of the performance of politically favored Federal programs would inconviently expose execution problems that could threaten their viability. The CitiStat approach offers great promise largely because, as described, it focuses on governmental organizations that are essentially solely responsible for delivery of specific services, i.e., they can't evade responsibility by trying to shift the blame elsewhere for performance shortcomings. The problem, however, as the article intimates, of holding a given governmental agency's feet to the fire becomes far more difficult when responsibility and its concomitant accountability for attainment of public policy performance goals are diffused among a number of organizations, often at different governmental levels. Governor O'Malley is obviously experiencing this at the state level, and it has been a similarly acute problem at the Federal level, as was and is still seen in the difficult and on-going efforts to implement GPRA expectations since 1993. The basic conundrum remains; if your agency is one that shares with other peer organizations responsibility for achieving a given policy outcome (e.g., improved illgal drug interdiction), or if your agency is a coordinative "steerer" rather than a actual "rower" in terms of service and performance delivery (which tends to be the paradigm in many Federal-state-local programs), and you do not have direct command and control over the "rowers," how is accountability to be allocated among the players in such contexts? That reality has bedevilled GPRA implementation efforts for the last 15 years, and it was a major challenge in setting up the PART process. There are no simple solutions to this problem. But CitiStat and like initiatives deserve to be considered, keeping in mind the complexities that come with shared responsibility constructs. Jeremiah Posted November 26, 2008 9:00 AM
