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Public Performance Measurement/Best Practices/E-Gov.
National Center for Public Performance, Rutgers University-Newark
United States

The Problem

The National Center for Public Performance (NCPP) at Rutgers University is a research and public service organization devoted to improving productivity in the public sector. Founded in 1975, the National Center serves as a vehicle for the study, dissemination and recognition of e-governance, performance measurement and improvement initiatives in government at all levels. In particular, the National Center specializes in research and teaching in Citizen-Driven Government Performance, developing curricular resources and delivering on-line training for public managers with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In this context, performance measurement is the process of measuring the outputs and outcomes of government in a systematic and functional manner. It provides public managers with essential data, enabling them to enhance internal operations and deliver efficient, effective services, while communicating service effectiveness to citizens and other stakeholders.

NCPP offers extensive publications on productivity and performance measurement, including more than one hundred and twenty issues of the Public Performance and Management Review; the Public Productivity Handbook (1st and 2nd Editions), which represents the most comprehensive discussion of the subject; Citizen-Driven Government Performance; and scores of articles and reports. Projects include online certification in public performance measurement, evaluation and case studies of jurisdictions working to measure performance and increase productivity, and recognition of best practices and exemplary cases of public productivity and e-governance throughout the world. For instance, NCPP has recognized state and local programs that stand out for their performance improvements under its Exemplary State and Local Awards Program (EXSL), established in 1989 and as a nationwide effort to recognize public initiatives that improve the quality of government services and operations. Worldwide e-governance awards are based on ninety-eight criteria, and are made biannually in conjunction with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. Most recently, the NCPP has developed a Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network, the mission of which is to create and strengthen connections among citizens, government officials and administrators, nonprofits and other groups in assessing public sector performance.

NCPP is unique in offering innovative classes in performance measurement, reporting and e-governance. The Performance Measurement Certificate Program consists of five online classes, and successful completion of the program results in certification in Public Performance Measurement. Those courses include:
1) Citizen-Driven Performance Improvement: An Introduction
2) Strategic Planning & Performance Based Budgeting
3) Citizen Engagement in Government
4) Citizen Surveys & Data Presentation
5) Governmental Transparency and E-Governance
Class activities include interactions with NCPP faculty and instructors, as well as practitioners at various levels of government agencies nationwide. Weekly discussion boards create a virtual community of colleagues that discuss and share information about performance measurement techniques and mechanisms to support citizen participation. Constructive assignments are geared toward improving management techniques and processes as public managers increasingly navigate a complex web of performance and accountability demands in today’s society.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
E-Governance Institute
Information-age governing presents an entirely new set of challenges for decision-makers, public sector professionals and citizens. The E-governance Institute's mission is to explore how the Internet and other information technologies (IT) have and will continue to impact on the productivity and performance of the public sector and how e-government fosters new and deeper mechanisms for citizen involvement within the governing process. The Institute is committed through its work to supporting the gathering and sharing of knowledge, information and data in order to increase the understanding of how e-governance can strengthen the fundamental partnership between the public sector and the private citizen.
Finding solutions to these challenges is the primary role of the E-Governance Institute. As part of Rutgers University's National Center for Public Performance, the Institute focuses its activities on emerging e-governance issues impacting on all levels of government, the non-profit sector, the private sector and the civil society. The principles of e-governance, as defined by the Institute, are relatively straightforward:
1) Build services around citizens' choices
2) Make government more accessible
3) Facilitate social inclusion
4) Provide information responsibly
Applying those principles to help governments utilize resources effectively and efficiently, the Institute conducts a bi-annual worldwide survey of municipal websites in conjunction with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea; that process results in an International Conference and Awards Program.

The Exemplary State and Local Awards Program (EXSL)

Begun in 1989, the Exemplary State and Local Awards Program (EXSL) was established by NCPP as a nationwide effort to recognize public initiatives that improve the quality of government services and operations. EXSL recognizes innovative projects and programs that have produced measurable increases in quality and productivity, significant cost savings, and improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. More than two hundred programs have been recognized.

Publications

The National Center has, for more than three decades, helped to define the field of public productivity and performance through its published research. The National Center has been the initiator of major publications, including:
Public Performance and Management Review (formerly Public Productivity Review), which is now entering its 30th volume, and has published more than 120 issues. All back issues of that journal are now available electronically on JSTOR and through M.E. Sharpe (the publisher).
Public Productivity Handbook (1st and 2nd) Editions—the most extensive compilation in this field.
Many books, most recently Citizen-Driven Government Performance.
Scores of articles and chapters in a wide range of international journals and compendia.

Conferences

Since 1976, the National Center has convened more than two dozen conferences on productivity and performance improvement in the public sector, and has also sponsored panels and workshops at other conferences. For example, the National Center was instrumental in convening three international conferences in June of 2006: the ASPA-EGPA Conference on Performance in Leuven, Belgium; a Public Service Conference with the Chinese Society of Public Administration and Renmin University in Beijing; and an E-Governance Conference with Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. In June of 2006 the National Center will convene the first of a series of conferences on Performance Measurement and Reporting in the U.S. (Newark and New York).

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
1975-National Center founded and first issues of its journal, Public Productivity Review (now Public Performance and Management Review) published
1976-First of more than two dozen national and international conferences convened by the National Center
1989- Exemplary State and Local Awards Program (EXSL)-established and awards given out for the first time
June-October 2003- First Digital Governance in Municipalities E-Survey conducted worldwide
1990s-First of a series of continuing projects on Citizen-Driven Government Performance initiated with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (funding amounts to more than $2 million to date)
2004- First Digital Governance in Municipalities E-Survey results released; Awards made.
June-October 2005- Second Digital Governance in Municipalities E-Survey conducted worldwide
2006- Second Digital Governance in Municipalities E-Survey results released; Awards made

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
E-Governance Institute
An international e-survey was conducted jointly by the E-governance Institute of Rutgers University-Newark and the Global e-Policy e-Government Institute of Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, and was co-sponsored by the UN Division for Public Administration and Development Management, and the American Society for Public Administration.
Exemplary State and Local Awards Program
d. Background
Each year, nominations are considered for projects and programs that have positive impacts on state and local government operations and the communities served by those entities. Public agencies, as well as community based organizations that receive at least 50% of their budgets from public sources, are eligible.

Publications
h. Background
The National Center’s efforts began with the publication of Public Productivity Review (now Public Performance and Management Review) thirty years ago, and has continued with publication of major books and contributions.
i. Priorities and purposes
The Publications Program is premised on the building of a strong foundation of knowledge in the emerging field of “public productivity and performance improvement.”
j. Strategies
The National Center has pursued a strategy of sponsoring publications from its own resources; partnering with commercial publishers; and undertaking joint projects with professional organizations such as the ASPA.
k. Changes resulting from the achievement(s)
The body of knowledge that has resulted from the National Center’s publications has made possible informed change in the public sector in the U.S. and worldwide, and has facilitated research in this area.
Conferences
l. Background
The National Center has convened more than two dozen of its own conferences and meetings.
Priorities
This series of efforts is based on the premise that personal interaction between informed presenters and inquisitive attendees is important to the process of adoption, adaptation and implementation of public sector reforms.
n. Strategies
Conferences are sponsored by NCPP, or co-sponsored in conjunction with other professional organizations. For, example, NCPP was instrumental in hosting the National Conference of the American Society for Public Administration at Rutgers University’s Newark Campus in 2001.
o. Changes
Public sector managers and researchers have attended the National Center’s meetings over the past decade.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
This is the first research effort to evaluate digital governance in municipalities throughout the world.The e-survey focused on the evaluation of current practice from the perspective of the government, and the emphasis was on the evaluation of each Web site in terms of digital governance. The research analyzed security, usability, and content of websites, the type of online services currently being offered, and citizen response and participation through websites established by city governments.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The researchers examined cities throughout the world based on their population size, the number and percentage of individuals using the Internet. The instrument for evaluating municipal Web sites consists of 98 measures over five core areas: 1. Security and Privacy, 2. Usability, 3. Content, 4. Services, 5. Citizen Participation. An overall score for each municipality was derived by giving equal weight to each of the five categories.
Changes resulting from the achievement(s)
Based on the evaluation of 100 cities, the top 5 cities are as follows:
RANKING CITY SCORE
1 Seoul 73.48
2 Hong Kong 66.57
3 Singapore 62.97
4 New York 61.35
5 Shanghai 58.00
Many of the cities noted in the report have used the survey as a diagnostic instrument to improve their services to citizens.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
These awards are models of creative approaches to problem solving across areas as diverse as administration and management, criminal justice, education, public works, environment, health and human services, housing,etc.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The National Center has put a great deal of emphasis on sustainable networks that will disseminate performance and improvement models. Those include:
The Performance Measurement and Reporting Network that is an open, interactive database of resources ranging from articles and books to websites relevant to performance measurement. The Network (membership in which is free) is designed to disseminate research-based models throughout the public and non-profit sectors. The Network website includes a listserv that will encourage the growth of a sustainable online performance measurement and reporting community, as well as groups with particular service delivery interests, such as parks and transit.
The National Center also offers individual memberships, and is linked to membership organizations such as the American Society for Public Administration and its Section on Public Performance Management (which the National Center has helped sustain for over twenty-five years).
The National Center has placed a great deal of emphasis on publications with enduring value, such as its highly-rated journal, Public Performance and Management Review, and has recently arranged for back issues to be available electronically at no cost to Network members.
Because conferences are very important mechanisms for networking and dissemination, the National Center has also placed a great deal of emphasis on sustaining such efforts over a period of some three decades. Thousand of academics and practitioners have attended those meetings, and the demand for those meetings is strong and growing.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
By no more than 500 words, describe what difficulties and obstacles were overcome. Also, consider including information on what could have been done differently.

The E-Governance Institute has successfully completed worldwide municipal surveys in some sixty languages, despite the difficulty of finding sufficient language surveyors, fluent in those languages and able to read and interpret the websites throughout the world and in languages other than English. This difficulty delayed completion of the project in a shorter time span of weeks rather than months, and required persistent and creative recruiting efforts. In future research funding and time permit us to do so, it would be worthwhile to survey at least two cities per country instead of the one largest city in each, thus affording broader representation.

Multi-Lingual Performance Aids Project- One of the major challenges facing local governments trying to implement public management reforms is the inadequacy of managerial systems and capacities. The goal of this emerging project is to build capacity for public management reforms abroad by providing diagrammatic summary “guides” in their own languages, guides translated from English and other languages that would help improving the abilities of local governments to deliver services to citizen, businesses, etc. The goals of this project are to translate of those documents into dozens of languages, beginning with Chinese, Korean, French and Hindi. The obstacle has been the software necessary to do this, but recently we have identified a promising means to doing so and we expect to begin this project in early 2007.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   National Center for Public Performance, Rutgers University-Newark
Institution Type:   Academia  
Contact Person:   Marc Holzer
Title:   Executive Director  
Telephone/ Fax:   973-353-5093 xt. 23
Institution's / Project's Website:   973-353-5907
E-mail:   mholzer@pipeline.com  
Address:   360 Dr. MLK Jr. Blvd., 701 Hill Hall
Postal Code:   07102
City:   Newark
State/Province:   NJ
Country:   United States

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