Performance Measurement in Municipal Government: Assessing the State of the Practice

The Big Question for Performance Management: Why Do Managers Use Performance Information?

“…There is significant evidence that perceived citizen support for or involvement in performance management processes facilitates use. Research suggests that perceived citizen demand for performance-based accountability encourages performance information use (Moynihan and Ingraham 2004;Poister and Streib 1999). de Lancer Julnes and Holzer (2001) find that support among external interest groups (in the form of elected official/citizens) for performance management also fostered use.…”

“…Participation has been portrayed as at odds with the technocratic decision approaches (Moynihan 2003). Public managers have sometimes proven reluctant to meaningfully incorporate citizen input into performance management systems (Heikkila and Isett 2007;Poister and Streib 1999) or view such participation as a way of legitimating rather than informing decisions (Moynihan 2003). Bureaucrats that use performance data may see less need to listen to citizen input and vice versa.…”

Performance Management of IT in Public Administrations: A Literature Review on Driving Forces, Barriers and Influencing Factors

“…There is a great number of driving forces, like creation of transpareny [11,12,14,20,[22][23][24]26] or improvement of decision-making [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. These driving forces face a huge number of barriers regarding the implementation and use of IT PM concepts.…”

“…We found that IT PM is mostly implemented in order to support decision-making [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], to create transparency [11,12,14,20,[22][23][24]26] as well as to improve accountability [7, 12, 16, 19, 21, 24-28, 37, 38], effectivity [20,22,26,27,[29][30][31] and efficiency [20,22,[26][27][28][29][30][31]. It should contribute to make public administrations more managerial and to make the IT usage more transparent and homogenous.…”

“…As a consequence, the information which can be derived from the KPIs is not used by them, i.e. no control impulses are derived from IT PM and there is no strategic IT PM [7,15,16,25,27,30,[41][42][43]. As public IT managers do not know the benefits which PM can have for them, they do not see any additional value, but only a greater bureaucratic effort.…”