Public Sector Performance Measurement for High Performance Government

One of the major responsibilities of any government is to deliver quality, relevant services that meet the needs of its citizens, communities, businesses and voluntary organizations. In the past few years, government organizations across Canada have been modernizing their service delivery practices through the intelligent use of technology and the introduction of alternative service delivery systems and mechanisms.

The pressures of constantly changing economic and social factors have increased the demands on government’s capacity to deliver value-added services to its clients. Accenture can help the federal and provincial governments in Canada enhance their performance in delivering public sector value by providing innovative and more efficient public services.

The Accenture Public Sector Value Model represents one of the main concerns of Canadians towards their governments—to measure performance from the citizen’s point of view. The model is unique in its approach to program performance measurement. Until now, no equivalent measure has existed in the public sector. Striving to enhance service delivery, performance measurement approaches that focus on measuring inputs (e.g., the number of police officers employed) and outputs (e.g. the number of people arrested for committing a crime) against many targets from varied levels of government, rather than outcomes (e.g., the results of policing policies on crime levels), are inadequate. Performance targets fail to take a holistic view of an agency’s performance and instead encourage a silo approach that often puts objectives at odds with each other.

This fundamental misalignment between current targets and what constitutes real value creation for the general public means that federal and provincial governments struggle to identify their true value drivers, therefore making it difficult to develop focused processes aimed at delivering more effective and efficient service. The Accenture Public Sector Value Model aims to address this fundamental challenge. It adapts the principles of Shareholder Value Analysis and is based on identifying a set of citizen-focused outcomes against which cost-effective delivery is measured.

The Accenture Public Sector Value Model is not intended to replace other performance measures such as Public Service Agreements, Service Delivery Agreements, or the balanced scorecard approach. Rather, it complements these other approaches. For example, while the Accenture Public Sector Value model answers the question, “Is this organization achieving its fundamental objectives?” other performance measures are still required to determine whether the organization is being well run. It does not set the standards of public service delivery, nor dictate the outcomes. Rather, it fills the long-standing gap of a standardized framework for assessing value creation in the public sector for the key stakeholder—the citizen.

Graeme Gordon, Partner, explains how the Accenture Public Sector Value model can be a tool for success in this Insight Article.

Read more about the Accenture Public Sector Value model in the current issue of Outlook, Accenture’s primary thought leadership publication. The article is titled Six Principles for High Performance in the Public Sector.

Read about our Public Sector Value Client Successes with the State of Indiana and State of Arizona.