Sarasota County's GovMax application: aligning business need with technical value.

• Author: Hanson, Robert

Much has been written about the importance of aligning our human, technical, and financial investments with known business challenges and needs. Examples of organizations that have done so are in short supply, however, leading one to wonder why Is the concept of alignment the latest management fad, just another technical buzzword, or an emerging best practice? This article will assess the real value of strategic alignment by examining Sarasota County's GovMax application, an example of building a platform across strategic areas, based on business need.

THE STRATEGIC BUSINESS NEED

In 2001, Sarasota County's newly assembled leadership team faced many questions. Was the county was getting the value it should from its investments of taxpayer dollars? Were the county's limited funds being allocated to the products and services valued most by the community? How did county officials know when a project was actually delivering the promised results? How would it be possible to stimulate innovation and focus on productivity in an organization that was largely accustomed to doing only more and more of the same? And what would it take to implement new, more efficient and effective business models, putting a stake in the heart of the "take last year and add X percent" model of public-sector financial management? The way to answer these questions was to benchmark the best--businesses, non-profits, professions, or other governments--and learn from their successes, challenges, and failures.

The foundation for change turned out to be a pretty obvious concept: "What gets measured gets managed." The best examples of this principle came from the county's analysis of management practices, along with their resulting business and organizational dynamics. An examination of the practices of successful chief financial officers (CFOs) seemed to reveal that the secret of CFO success is an unending focus on performance measures, and the effects of varying strategies and tactics on a particular measure.

The finance function exists to manage the financial health of an organization, and it goes right to performance measures to do so: fund balances, budget to actual reports, return on investment, bond rates, days of operating reserve, debt ratios, etc. It is hard to imagine measuring the financial function with squishy measures. The financial profession seems to be the proof that what gets measured gets managed. The next question, then, is why solid measures are not applied as easily across all public services and professions.

For Sarasota County, one answer was the culture of its public organizations. The mindset that "we are different from the business world" can be so pervasive that people make it so, regardless of whether this needs to be the case. The county initially had to spend months and even years positioning a new vernacular within the ranks to define performance-based management, a process often prolonged by those who believed they could wait out this latest management fad.

The county's next step was a meaningful and clear organization-wide strategy that would show where resources should be focused, what success would look like, and how progress could be measured. County executives were charged with developing strategies to optimize the...