Businesslike management of government operations is being practiced more, according to David Broder, who wrote recently in his Washington Post column (see below) about a joint report on the "2008 Government Performance Project". It seems a foundation, the Pew Center, and Governing Magazine just issued their second report after the first was issued in 2005, and businesslike management of government operations is growing. He cited several examples, and described how some newly elected State Governors (not Florida!) with management experience are setting a new tone of expectations on how government should work and be "managed". They even state that performance auditing was rare in 2005, but is now routine if four fifths of the states.
The report ranks states, and Florida is neither at the top of bottom of the list, so I will look it up and add it back here later.
The full results of the study are in the March issue of Governing magazine, as well as at www.pewcenteronthestates.org/gpp .
I will read the report and see what can be applied here in Lake County. For instance, we have been talking on this blog about adding performance benchmarks for the Lake County School District (which has NONE), and the article describes how Michigan Governor Jennifer Granhold (a Democrat, no less) actually starts each workday with reports from her team on the status of benchmark goals established for the week (not just the year).
In another example, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue established a 2003 committee of local business people and asked them to review all state agencies, and develop a list of "actionable 90-day steps" to improve the agencies (not a long consultants report), and their ideas were implemented and "yielded $100-million a year in procurement savings" and other benefits.
In contrast, during the recent public interviews for Lake County School District Superintendent , I submitted a question for five of the candidates (I couldn't be there for Dr. Williams) asking them to describe examples of operations performance benchmarks they would implement for non-instructional staff if hired. Two of them clearly didn't even understand what a performance benchmark was, and only one cited "Scorecard" examples of ones he already uses. Another candidate ran off a list of buzzwords, and generic ideas, but no clear examples of actually having used them before, even in prior work areas.
Lake County taxpayers deserve professional businesslike management of government operations, and that will continue to be our focus here.
vj
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from Washington Post at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702835.html
Managing: An Affair Of States
By David S. Broder
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B07
The drama of this winter's presidential campaign obscures the fact that for most of us, the government services that most directly affect our lives are delivered from state capitols or city halls.
That's why, at the first break in many months on the primary calendar, I went to a briefing last week at the Ronald Reagan Building on the 2008 Government Performance Project, a joint venture of the Pew Center on the States and Governing magazine.
For months, teams of journalists and academic researchers dug into the workings of all 50 states and graded them, from A to F, on detailed score sheets. The national average was B-minus, the same as in the previous study in 2005, but as the Pew people told me, "the expectations were higher across the board this year, so it took more to get the same grade."
Combining the grades for managing employees, budgets, information systems and infrastructure planning -- the four areas of focus -- three states were at the top, with A-minus ratings: Utah, Virginia and Washington. At the bottom were Rhode Island and New Hampshire, which scored C-minus and D-plus, respectively. (The full results are available in the March issue of Governing or at http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/gpp.)
At the briefing, Neal Johnson, the project's director, remarked that "a new generation of governors is focusing on management," in part because citizens are so skeptical of government but also because tough economic times demand it and because their own backgrounds point them in that direction.
The first two governors he mentioned were Indiana Republican Mitch Daniels, the former head of the federal Office of Management and Budget, and New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine, the former director of a giant Wall Street investment bank. Both are accustomed to measuring by results.
Two governor-managers were at the briefing. Michigan Democrat Jennifer Granholm said she begins each workday in Lansing with reports from "my team" on the status of the benchmark goals they have set out to accomplish that week.
Georgia Republican Sonny Perdue recounted how, upon taking office in 2003, he recruited teams of business executives to evaluate state agencies, telling them that he wanted not voluminous reports but "actionable, 90-day steps" to improve services. So far, he said, they have produced 80 suggestions, among them systems that Perdue said have yielded $100 million a year in procurement savings and have cut the wait time for obtaining a driver's license to 10 minutes.
The full report is loaded with other examples of innovations -- along with citations of conspicuous failures. "New Hampshire," it says, "has such weak data-sharing systems that it doesn't know how much it spends each month," while Wyoming's transportation department has information tools that can tell it "with exact specificity how money is being spent, down to the cost of the salt used between each mile marker on the state's snowy roads."
As a sign of the progress states have made, where only half of them in 2005 had strategic planning capacity, now only nine are lacking in that ability. Performance auditing, which was rare three years ago, is now routine in four-fifths of the states.
The report, as Pew officials emphasized, is the beginning, not the end of the process, serving as a guidebook to state officials in the market for "best practices." Governors borrow readily from each other, Granholm said, noting that despite hard times and tight budgets in her state, she had taken a cue from former Virginia governor Mark Warner and brought her constituents into the budget-making process through town meetings and a prize-winning Web site.
Both governors acknowledged that it often has been difficult to stir up much enthusiasm in their legislatures for managerial initiatives. "They yawn," Perdue said, "and often it's a struggle to keep them up to speed" on the changes he's trying to make in the executive agencies. "But they like to campaign on the results."
Granholm agreed but said that her state's Legislature has recently decided to create a joint, bipartisan committee on management.
As Perdue said, managing government "is not a sexy issue." But after months of listening to 17 or 18 presidential candidates offer rhetorical salve for the widespread distrust of government, it was refreshing to learn from this report and briefing what some practitioners are actually doing to improve its performance.