Seeing eye to eye: performance measures that matter to citizens.(THE BOOKSHELF)

Listening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance

Published by Fund for the City of New York www.fcny.org

2005; 102 pages; $17

Citizen participation has often been the square peg that public administrators try to squeeze into the round holes of government, whether it is for strategic planning, budgeting, land-use planning, or other key processes. This is especially true when it comes to performance measurement. Most participation is input driven (citizen satisfaction surveys) or output driven (annual performance reports). While both are important components of a performance measurement system, neither impact the design of the system or influence what is actually measured. Barbara J. Cohn Berman's Listening to the Public presents the results of a multiyear research project conducted by the Fund for the City of New York that provides local governments with a rounder peg that has the potential to greatly influence the design of their performance measurement systems.

Taking its cue from private sector market research practices, the Fund's Center on Municipal Government Performance set out to listen to the citizens of New York City through focus groups, surveys, and interviews over a six-year period between 1996 and 2001 to determine how the public perceived local government performance. Overall, researchers found participants to be knowledgeable about public services and realistic in their expectations. Their opinions were shaped by their own personal experiences and most critically influenced by their interactions with government employees and agencies. Most interestingly, the results suggest that citizens often evaluate governmental performance differently than do the governments themselves. While governments tend to report inputs (number of tons of salt spread), outputs (number of lane-miles plowed), and efficiency measures (dollars per lane mile of street plowed), citizens are most interested in the quality of the service provided. Indeed, their perception of service often crosses departmental boundaries to which most performance measures are often restricted.

While these results are interesting, they are not necessarily surprising. The value of Berman's work is her methodology and its potential widespread application and impact. During the focus groups, participants were provided brief descriptions of 30 different city responsibilities so that all had an equal base level of understanding. Participants then ranked how familiar they were with each service, how important they believed each service to be, and how well each service is performed. While not scientific, these ratings provide insight into the public's perception of city services, allowing researchers to draw the conclusions mentioned.

From focus group discussions stimulated by this activity and subsequent phone interviews, Berman extrapolates common themes and presents potentially new performance measures that are important to citizens. For example, one person had this comment: "I called 9-1-1 for my grandmother. They came quickly, knew what to do, and got her to the right hospital on time." From this one comment Berman derived three potential performance measures: (1) the initial response time to reach the patient, (2) the elapsed time to transport the patient to the appropriate hospital, and (3) the knowledge, compassion, competence, and responsiveness of personnel. Berman documents comments and potential performance measures for each of the 30 services ranked. Such an exercise could ...