In contrast to private sector financial value, Accenture aims to give governments a tool to measure their performance, writes Karlin Lillington

Assessing the performance of a publicly quoted company is, if not easy in the details, at least straightforward to the general public: check the numbers and see how the company is rewarding its shareholders.

But measuring the performance of government departments and agencies is more difficult. On one hand, citizens expect more public accountability and performance from their government.

At the same time, governments aren't in business to be in business, so to speak. They have to respond to a broader constituency and provide a greater range of services than a private company, whether or not it is "good business" to do so.

"There's a huge demand for government to do more and spend less," says Vivienne Jupp, senior partner with a focus on egovernment at consultancy Accenture.

"So government agencies are pulled in two ways. The minister is pulling one way, the treasury, another."

Speaking at Accenture's research centre, tucked away in the hills in Sophia Antipolis near Nice in France, Jupp - a former head of Ireland's Information Society Commission - says that the company has tried to give governments a tool for measuring their own performance by developing what it calls a Public Sector Value Model (PSVM).

Yes, it is classic consultancy speak, but the idea is actually quite interesting when picked apart: take a look at the private sector's ways of measuring performance and then consider what can be brought over directly into the public sector and what needs to be tweaked in new ways to suit the public sector.

The result, says Jupp, is both a performance management tool and a strategic planning tool.

"It allows you to assess the value that a project is delivering. It also helps you see, in areas that if you develop them further, how it would drive up the value of the project," she says.

In coming up with the model, researchers decided that what was needed was a way of measuring "citizen value" - by contrast to the financial value used to measure the performance of private companies. Citizens are the shareholders in government, notes Jupp, but they are looking for a different kind of outcome than a straightforward financial assessment of government performance.

Accenture notes that the existing ways of looking at government performance tend to stress either inputs (the number of police officers employed) or outputs (the drop in local crime), but don't look at outcomes (how the crime rate has been affected by spending on new security measures).

Jupp says finding ways of measuring outcomes over time gives citizens - as well as government itself - a tangible understanding of how government projects are working.

Further measurement tools can be applied - tools already used widely in the private sector for performance or economic measurements - to assess how outcomes could be affected by different inputs.

For example, if more police officers are deployed, how significant an effect will that have on crime rates, and how cost-effective is that approach compared to, say, adding closed circuit television (CCTV) monitoring?

The PSVM also looks at cost-effectiveness through existing measurement techniques and some designed by the consultancy. She stresses that the point is not to offer a model that is totally different, but something that makes existing techniques more useful within the public sector.

"There are already a huge range of metrics around. PSVM's intention is not to put those in the bin, but to build on them." A broader model can help pull all the individual measurement techniques together "in a more comprehensive way," she says.

"So what is different in this model? It is outcome-focused and takes an agency-wide view," she notes.

Working with the government agency, Accenture has them put weightings on what they need to achieve based on levels of importance.

For example, London police wanted outcomes weighted so that 35 per cent of focus went to reducing crime, 35 per cent on investigating crime, and 30 per cent was on citizen relationships.

Working through weightings can help an agency figure out what its priorities are when it is seeking change. Jupp points towards the Arizona department of revenue as an example.

With a remit to collect revenue, lower its own costs, and improve service for customers, the agency decided its four focus areas would be 20 per cent to maximise tax revenue, 30 per cent to maximise tax compliance, 20 per cent to minimise the taxpayer burden, and 20 per cent to maximise responsiveness to taxpayers.

The heavier weighting on compliance came through study and discussion that revealed previous years' work to raise citizen satisfaction and efficiency in the service had been accompanied by dropping levels of voluntary compliance.

Jupp says getting the balance right is crucial and can take many meetings with people within the organisation.

The balance affects how costings are done within the agency and which projects are prioritised in order to meet those goals.

The main advantage to such a model is to give an image of an agency over time, by providing an initial baseline for comparison either within the agency or setting the agency against others.

Accenture emphasises that the model is useful for looking at relative change - not whether an agency is doing well or badly per se, but whether it has improved or not on the previous year.

The model also enables an agency to see which actions contributed towards the improvements, and which did not provide value.

"The model also pinpoints areas to spend time on, can provide justification for budget requests, and pinpoints areas within government agencies that are underperforming," says Jupp.