Does Benchmarking Make Public Servies Look Inefficient?
Can the public sector run as efficiently as the private sector? The general answer is "yes" from those driving the new business process-benchmarking movement in state government.The idea is to systematically compare the efficiency of state government business processes to those of other governments and organizations of similar complexity.
Two states recently implemented multi-agency benchmarking projects, and more look to adopt the budding trend.
The Usual Comparison
People often taunt the public sector for lagging behind the private sector in efficiency, but only few make relevant comparisons. While private companies can centralize authority, allowing decisions and tasks to be executed quickly, government disperses responsibility across multiple agencies by authority of a constitution.
Since the inception of benchmarking in the 1970s, private businesses have used it to measure their own effectiveness against metrics collected from similar companies. Now public-sector organizations are beginning to catch up.
"If you look at government today, and you look at the citizen-facing programs, there are ways of measuring how successful those programs are -- how many students are being educated, how many are graduating, how many highways are being maintained or built, or how many children are being fed through child support programs," said David Wilson, managing director for finance and administration industry within state and local government at Accenture.
In a world where we are trying to figure out how to create more citizen-facing programs for less cost, one of the areas for opportunity is to wring some of the costs out of the back office," he added, noting that there was no systematic method for measuring the back office before benchmarking caught fire in the private sector.
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