Please enter your thoughts, suggestions, concerns, successes, etc. about performance measurement.
For the purpose of this blog, we might want to be careful about what we include in this category. My preference is that we limit it to the issues of how to measure, what measures are valid, how to develop proxy measures, how frequently we collect the measures, how much detail to collect, the trade-off between relevance and reliability and similar issues. There certainly are pleny of these to wrestle with - but we (in my humble opinion) often confuse the measuring issues with the other similar performance activities that have unique challenges such as reporting and auditing or managing and budgeting.
When I pause to think of great online resources in this area, I step back and realize that no generic website comes to mind. There certainly are efforts at measurement driven by particular programatic areas, such as police or education or healthcare or transportation or corrections, but nothing of a general nature (please post one if you know).
One example of a well-defined measurement system for a programatic area is in corrections. http://www.asca.net/pbms.html and two of the downloads - Key Indicators (05/27/08) and the Glossary of PBMS Terms (updated May 2008). Note that the initiative was started in 2001 and is not yet nationally deployed.
Another topic that crosses over here and with information systems is the concept of "meta-data" - such as used in the XML language (eXtensible Markup Language). XML can be customized to numerous settings, so you may have heard recently about XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) which the Securities and Exchange Commission is now promoting. The AGA has a project involving XML under the original title of "Process-Based Reporting" - though the name may be changed to "Performance Based Management". The State of Oregon is a leading state in this area, currently doing a pilot project.
