Reinventing government - not easy, but possible.

• Author: Snell, Ronald K.

Changing the process of government is a slow, painful chore.

Reinventing Government is a book that has become a cause since David Osborne and Ted Gaebler published their bestseller in 1992. The book tries to show ways to make government responsive, effective and credible. Reinventing Government preaches a gospel of strategic planning, entrepreneurship, and results-oriented and customer-driven government.

State governments have responded enthusiastically, some with sweeping initiatives that have won national attention like Minnesota Milestones or Oregon Benchmarks. Almost every state has set new requirements for strategic planning, performance measurement and performance budgeting. It's too early to decide whether reinventing government can be called a success - not for lack of signs of success but because of the enormous size of the task. Senator Tom Rossin of Florida, a strategic planning consultant in private life and a leading advocate of strategic budgeting for the state, says, "When we do this in the private sector, we ask for a commitment so we can change corporate culture over five to 10 years." But if it's too soon to expect revolution in state government, there is a lot happening. And not least in state legislatures.

Some state legislatures are recreating their budget process as the foundation of the reinvention of government. Budgeting is the foundation because the budget document is state government's overall plan of activities, and budget administration guides the day-to-day, everyday work of every government employee. States that have embarked on budget reform hope to refocus state government on service, effectiveness and accountability through the adoption of a kind of budget called a performance budget.

Performance budgeting requires radical changes in how state budgets look and how they operate. Why it's desirable to do that, and what's being done, requires a brief excursion into the dismal science of public budgeting.

Budgets are both a document and a process. There's the documentation that shows what agencies are directed to do and how much money they can spend to do it. The process has two parts - legislative enactment and executive administration. The operative theory here is that if you change the document, you change the processes. As Reinventing Government says, "What gets measured gets done." If you measure the number of hours nurses spend at maternal and child health clinics, you get the maximum number of hours for your money. If you want to make sure those hours are well used, you measure their outcome - something like the state rate of infant mortality. That's the theory of performance budgeting - changing the structure of activities changes the nature of activities.

State budgets traditionally have listed amounts of money for objects of expenditure. Some specific amount was to be spent for a children's program or providing guards at a penitentiary or staffing a historical monument. The purpose of such budgets is to prevent the diversion of public money from designated purposes. They are one element in an accounting process. That's important, but it doesn't emphasize results. Legislators might well ask: Is the children's program run well? Is it meeting its objectives? But they equally well might not ask, and the form of the traditional state budget did not force questions of satisfactory performance or outcomes on agencies or on legislators.

Performance-based budgeting is intended to put performance and outcomes at the center of the budget process. The legislatures that are moving toward PBB usually have focused on agency performance reporting, which means that the budget itself sets performance goals for an agency and stresses accountability and reporting.

A performance budget has these characteristics:

* It sets an agency mission, goals (ways to put the mission in effect) and specific, measurable objectives.

* It reports on past performance in specific ways with the goal of providing comparable data over a period of...