Information on Governing conferences

NEW YORK CITY — Focusing government's attention on its own performance — measuring it, managing it, improving it — requires most offices, agencies and departments to undergo the equivalent of an extreme makeover. At Governing's Managing Performance 2007, speaker after speaker emphasized the hard work such a transformation entails.

Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser

Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser, the city's veteran auditor who surprised many by running for — and being elected — mayor in 2007, called for a "culture change" in state and local government. "I want a culture that has respect for facts, data and analysis. I want respect for professionalism and professional expertise. I want a government that's accountable for its outcomes, especially citizen satisfaction," he told the 400 state and local public officials gathered in here for Governing's annual management conference.

A CULTURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Increased transparency is the first step toward that accountability, Funkhouser said: Be honest with citizens — give them real, truthful, unbiased information on how your government is performing — and you will start to gain citizen trust. You can build on that trust by honing your measures and managing government to give citizens the improved results they want, he added.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels

In many ways, government has the option of ignoring the push to perform. Government is, after all, "the last real monopoly," noted Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. "Government has the luxury of doing a bad job and nothing bad happens," he said. "It's hard to get performance management when there's an absence of competition."

"Progress starts with data," said Daniels, who director of the White House Office of Management and Budget during the first term of President George W. Bush. And, he added, top-down support is critical. "In a monopoly, accountability for results has to be implanted by strong leadership."

Demonstrating that brand of leadership as well as a firm grasp of the nuts and bolts of management, Daniels described his approach to Indiana's challenges, including balancing the budget, implementing a fully-funded multi-year transportation infrastructure plan, deregulating the telecommunications industry and consolidating IT operations and procurement services. Daniels has prodded the state to achieve improved results in areas such as reduced wait-times at motor-vehicle offices and a marked increase in the percentage of child-support payments being collected.

New York State's Olivia Golden

Olivia Golden, the director of state operations for the office of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, agreed that what is usually needed is a culture change. To reshape government by focusing on results, she said, "takes more than a technical systems fix. If your goal is to increase your performance, your strategy is going to be more complicated. It takes a change in your entire environment."

Golden outlined the steps governments must take to implement this new culture: articulate goals, start immediately, measure early, refine your measures and learn as you go. The value of a focus on results — creating a better, more responsive, more efficient government — is not debatable, she said, but to institute and implement that focus requires driven leaders dedicated to changing the culture of government.

LEGISLATIVE ENGAGEMENT

Legislators are critical to the process. Without legislative buy-in, agencies will never fully be held accountable for what they do, or don't, accomplish. Until recently, that was the case in Connecticut. Performance management statutes had been on the books for years, but no one was really paying attention.

"We needed a system that legislators would find user-friendly," said Connecticut state Representative Diana Urban, who led the effort to make performance management a real, ingrained part of the state's legislative budgeting process.

And that required agencies to think about how they presented information to the legislature. Connecticut couldn't make any headway until legislators received information in a usable way, Urban said. That meant agreeing on a common definition of terms such as "outcomes" and "measures" and providing lawmakers with a one-page summary of agency performance data, including relevant charts and a narrative "story" about the measures. And it's up to the agencies to suggest no-cost or low-cost options for addressing areas in which measures are lagging.

It's working, says Urban. Connecticut lawmakers have institutionalized performance measures in an agency's budget, and are using them to allocate resources. In one recent budget cycle, for instance, legislators saw that measures of reading skills were moving in the wrong direction. So they redirected $20 million from programs, largely from those that weren't producing results.

MANAGEMENT MAYORS

A steadily growing number of elected leaders are paying serious attention to the rarely dramatic, or politically potent, subject of management. In addition to Governor Daniels and Mayor Funkhouser, three other mayors spoke at Managing Performance 2007 about their methods of gathering and using data to drive improvement in city government.

Mayors Byron Brown of Buffalo and Joe Curtatone of Somerville, Massachusetts, talked about the importance of institutionalizing regular, systematic, data-focused reviews of the results achieved by city agencies. Mayor Frank Hibbard of Clearwater, Florida, discussed his method of gathering data — and feedback — from citizens through monthly breakfasts convened with his city council colleagues.

New York Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff

New York City Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff described some of the evidence of his city's progress under the leadership of the nation's most visible management mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg took office six years ago, months after September 11, 2001. His management style, well-honed during a highly successful business career, combines effective delegation with innovative use of government data.

Doctoroff, whose portfolio includes economic development and the rebuilding of lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11, pointed out that New York City has gone from a $5 billion deficit to a $5 billion surplus and its highest-ever bond rating. Population is at an all-time high, and unemployment and crime are at historic lows.

While Doctoroff acknowledged that New York's fortunes have always reflected larger market trends and that global economic growth is a boon, he credited city government with driving these changes like never before. "New York has always been a boom town and a bust town," Doctoroff said, "but times have never been this good. To me, this time is different. And the difference is all about management."

Flexible approaches, Doctoroff said, have been key to the city's current successes, and by changing conventional ways of thinking and introducing private-sector business practices, Bloomberg has achieved remarkable results in a relatively short period of time. Bloomberg has established a vision for the city and mapped out specific ways to achieve those goals. "As shocking as it sounds," Doctoroff said, "never before in New York City did any agency actually have a strategic plan. We now do."

New York Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs

And the city is using flexible, novel approaches to help it reach its ambitious goals. For example, in an effort to reduce poverty across the city, the administration has created the Center for Economic Opportunity, or CEO, a concerted effort to help the city's working poor. New York City Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, who is leading the anti-poverty initiative, talked about how flexible thinking is helping the city serve its neediest citizens.

The CEO, for instance, is creating an Office of Financial Empowerment to help low-income people manage the money they make once the city has helped them find a job. "Reducing poverty isn't just about increasing income," said Cathie Mahon, the head of the financial empowerment office. "It's about helping people use that income to create better lives for themselves."

BUDGET BREAKTHROUGHS

Governments, as well as citizens, sometimes need to rethink how they manage and spend their money.

Nationally, a number of cities, counties and states are adopting an outcomes-based budget process as a way to link government spending more closely with the priorities of their communities. They're following in the footsteps of Washington State, which five years ago pioneered a new way of budgeting when faced with the need to close a $2.7 billion gap between revenue and spending.

Working with a broad group of citizens and other stakeholders, the state developed a list of 10 priorities to guide government's use of available revenues. Programs that helped accomplish those goals were funded; those that didn't were not. The state successfully closed its budget gap and reshaped its government in the process.

Fort Collins, Colorado, is one of the cities that is adopting and adapting this approach to reshape its budgeting process.

Darin Atteberry, city manager of Fort Collins, notes the positive contrast between the new and the old method, which he describes as "whining for dollars."

"Agency heads would come in and gripe until they got the money they wanted," Atteberry said. Now a revised budgeting process helps ensure that the money city government spends is achieving the community's goals. "I believe that 10 years from now, there won't be conferences on this because everyone will be doing it," Atteberry said. "This is absolutely where government is headed."

Virginia's Wayne Turnage

Taking a different budget route to linking spending and results, the state of Virginia worked for years to implement performance-based budgeting. But it wasn't until officials began to rethink the budget process from top to bottom that Virginia started to truly connect spending and results, says Wayne Turnage, chief of staff to Governor Tim Kaine.

Under former Governor Mark Warner (2002-2006), Virginia adopted strategic planning in earnest. Warner worked individually with agencies to establish performance agreements, and the legislature mandated a strategic planning process. But it took several years, according to Turnage, and a severe reduction in the number of agency measures (from more than 2,000 to slightly more than 200), before these steps produced real change in the way the state allocated funds.

Kaine has emphasized to agency heads that performance management is his top priority, meeting with them quarterly to discuss measures and personally discussing every single metric. And he has explicitly made these measures a part of the budget process. "It's now a more coordinated system," Turnage said. "The components fit together better. Performance management is how we're making decisions."

WORK THAT MATTERS

When government delivers real, measurable results, the people who make government work tend to be happier, more satisfied and more dedicated. Today that's not the norm, said Jonathan Walters, author of the new Governing book, Measuring Up 2.0.

"Many public employees have become uninterested and unexcited about their work," Walters said. "Their daily work has become disconnected from any higher purpose." Too many government managers have focused too much on punching timecards and checking off tasks. "We've got to reconnect people with the higher calling that their work in public service represents. And we've got to move government off its focus on activities and processes and on to a focus on performance and results."

News from the conference:
• Key to Managing a Boom Town: Flexibility
• The Hard Work of Boosting Performance

Copyright © 2008, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.