Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

158 Public Management and Administration
There is a general aim to monitor and improve the progress of staff and agencies
towards achieving objectives.
One of the starting points was the Financial Management Initiative (FMI) in
the United Kingdom that aimed at promoting in each department (UK Treasury
and Civil Service Committee, 1982):
an organisation and a system in which managers at all levels have:
● a clear view of their objectives; and means to assess, and wherever possible, measure,
outputs or performance in relation to those objectives;
● well-defined responsibility for making the best use of their resources, including a critical
scrutiny of output and value for money; and
● the information (particularly about costs), the training and the access to expert advice
which they need to exercise their responsibilities effectively.
This had implications for financial management, but also for personnel and
performance. Indeed, all three were linked together in a new management system
which involved the specification of objectives for all government policies
and for individual units within the bureaucracy; precise allocation of costs to
activities and programmes; and ‘the development of performance indicators
and output measures which can be used to assess success in achieving objectives’
(Carter, Klein and Day, 1992, p. 5).
Carter, Klein and Day argue that the FMI in the United Kingdom represented
‘a move to institutionalise the search for efficiency and to generalise the
attempts to change the management culture of Whitehall’. Performance indicators
became a new movement within the public services with the express aim
of finding out how hard government activity was to measure. As a result, FMI
was ‘intended to challenge the way in which the public sector has gone about
its business for a century or more’ (ibid., 1992, pp. 22–3). Performance indicators
were established for all kinds of activities. Indeed, in some offices,
a bewildering number of them were used, often far too many. Carter, Klein and
Day argue (1992, p. 181) that different indicators can be developed for different
purposes:
Given different policy objectives, different kinds of performance indicator systems will
emerge. So, for example, if the prime concern is with the efficient use of public resources,
the emphasis will be on trying to devise output (and, if possible, outcome) measures: the
approach of the economist … If the prime concern is with accountability, then a rather
different emphasis may emerge: process indicators which measure the way in which services
are delivered to the public – their availability, their timeliness, may be more relevant.
If the focus of attention is on managerial competence, then the stress may be on setting
targets for the performance of individual units or branches. These objectives may, of
course, coexist within the same branch.
Governments have increased the use of performance indicators, as the managerial
system takes hold and such data becomes the subject of public debate.
If central government ‘is to maintain control over the implementation of