Harry P. Hatry

Is performance measurement really here to stay? Is it merely another management fad? Will it merely be window dressing with little substantive use of the performance information? These are the sixty-four-dollar questions for performance measurement.

On the bright side, the field of performance measurement has not yet been assigned an acronym (although limited use has been made of initials such as SEA for Service Efforts and Accomplishments and GPRA for the federal 1993 Government Performance and Results Act). Nevertheless, many hurdles exist before performance measurement can be presumed to be a real success for public administration and management.

An amazing amount of interest and activity is occurring at all three levels of government: federal, state, and local. But, as John Greiner points out in his chapter, probably the most typical use of performance measurements is "merely to decorate a budget document." The ultimate purpose of performance measurements is to use the measurement information to help make improvements--whether to expand, delete, or modify programs. This use still appears to be highly limited. However, some important exceptions exist that have been present for many years and thus are not usually thought of as being part of performance measurement, although they should be. These exceptions include the extensive use of reported crime data and crime clearance rates by police departments; data on amount of losses due to fires; data on traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths; and extensive data on incidence of morbidity and mortality. Such data are routinely collected and widely used by agencies at all three levels of government. These set precedents for the future. While debates often occur over the accuracy of some of these numbers, they are widely accepted as part of "everyday life" for the managers of these programs.

The great thing about performance measurement is that it is inherently . . .