The Orlando Sentinel had a front page article HERE on Scott's aim to run Florida like a business.
Here are my comments about the article:
After four years of writing a blog ( www.FiscalRangers.com ) on encouraging the local Lake County government and School District to be more efficient and run like a business (better contracts that don't give away the farm, use of metrics to evaluate cost per service, no sole source contracting, use of sound economic data to make decisions, etc), I suggest that Scott will have problems with the entrenched staff who won't change internal processes unless fired. He can appoint leaders over the various Departments, but unless they have some experienced business process troubleshooters who find the internal process problems, define solutions and monitor implementation, there won't be much progress. They will constantly tell him "there are no resources" to track spending effectiveness, and 3 years down the line he will find no improvement.
As an example, the local Lake County government lists "work measurements" in their departmental budget sections, but they only report activity counts like phone calls received or fire report incidents , but don't calculate trends of costs per service, expect plans for improvement in the metrics, etc.
Jeb Bush tried some improvements with the OPPAGA program, but I know one agency that just copied answers from another County group and submitted them, and didn't implement many of the recommendations.
