Blazing a trail in publicly engaged performance measurement and management.

• Author: Kinney, Anne Spray
• Position: Book review

When Governments Listen: Moving Toward Publicly Engaged Governing

By Barbara J. Cohn Berman

Fund for the City of New York

2012, 118 pages, $17

Measuring performance in the public sector is a dicey proposition. Governments need to ask and answer several key questions before they commit their resources to such an initiative. What is the main purpose of measuring performance? How will performance data be collected, stored, analyzed, and communicated? How will measures be used for managing and decision making? And, perhaps most critically, what will improve for the public as a result? When Governments Listen sheds light on all of these questions, focusing on the public's role.

The book can be read on three levels. First, it tells the story of the Trailblazers, who represented 70 public jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, working to make their performance information resonate with the citizens they served. Second, it can be read as a guidebook for governments that want to institute citizen-driven performance measurement and management. The third level is the way performance measurement and management can help bridge the gap in understanding, trust and confidence--so ubiquitous in contemporary America--between governmental entities and the constituents they serve.

THE TRAILBLAZER PROJECT

The impetus for the Trailblazers came from an earlier project of the National Center for Civic Innovation's Center on Government Performance. That project, described in Berman's Listening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance Measurement and Reporting (Fund for the City of New York, 2005), used contemporary market research methodologies in seeking to understand how the public evaluates governmental performance and to translate that information into citizen-focused performance measures. Among the main conclusions of that research were: 1) that there is a substantial gap between how the public perceives government performance and how governments typically perceive their performance internally; and 2) that it is possible for governments to create measures that reflect the public's perspective and use those measures to better align government services and programs with the public's needs and expectations.

When Governments Listen describes how the Center on Government Performance used what was learned in the previous research and put it to use in the grant-funded Trailblazers program. The new book explains why the program...