It is commonly agreed that an advanced Performance Measurement System, including both financial and non financial indicators, may help to achieve the strategic objectives established within a Quality Management System.
While the latter can ensure the managerial formulation of strategies and their assessment and monitoring, the former will manage the resources to be used to the purpose and control the achievement of the objectives stated. Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard has been repeatedly called for in this context. This forms an integral part of a “third wave” of public sector evaluation, characterised by “internal” institutions, practices and tools like e.g. self-evaluative procedures and reports, agency-based performance indicators etc.
While Drucker’s idea of an agency has not taken place so far, modern regulation theories now admit in its place the establishment of rules, procedures and standards, helping to make the Governments more accountable for their performance towards the citizens. Some international comparisons (from OECD Puma to EU Sigma) already show that the ‘power of standards’ can be used to elicit process reengineering, comparability and harmonisation of practices in tge Public Administration. However, an insufficient attention has been given until now to change realised through quality management principles implementation.
More generally, we believe that a unified and systematic approach to public performance evaluation is missing, which should make use of innovative concepts and tools like social and democratic dialogue and an extensive participation of citizens/customers in the governance and accountability process.
The Living Labs concept is a recent innovation approach set forth in Northern Europe, through which all stakeholders of a product, service or application actively participate in its development process. Stakeholders can be public authorities, civic communities, SMEs and large industries, academia, content providers etc. The underlying R&D methodology enables innovation to be created and validated in a collaborative, multi-context, real-life environment, where the person is focused and monitored in all his/her social roles as (e.g.) a citizen, user, consumer or worker. This human-centric, experience-based perspective does not only ensure a user-driven design and development of products, services or applications, but also user acceptance. The idea is to reach a more sustainable innovation by taking benefit of the ideas, experiences and knowledge of the people involved with respect to their daily needs, in their every day lives, encompassing all their societal roles.
Additional methodology reflections are needed to assess whether the Living Labs paradigm can be helpful in reviving and consolidating the theoretical foundations for a citizens-focused, participatory performance measurement system that is more coherent with the increasingly ‘networked’ configuration of modern Public Administration and the need to find a balanced pathway between budget restrictions and quality assessment of ‘government reengineering processes’.
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