Good overview on a Governance Performance meeting, revealing that some public administrators are working hard at managing effectively.
The government rankings mentioned in the article can be found here
David S. Broder: Best leaders get results by good management
By David S. Broder -
Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, March 10, 2008
The drama of this winter's presidential campaign obscures the fact that for most of us, the government services that most directly impact our lives are delivered from state capitols or city halls.
That's why, at the first break in many months on the primary calendar, I went to a briefing last week at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., on the 2008 Government Performance Project, a joint venture of the Pew Center on the States and Governing magazine.
For months, teams of journalists and academic researchers dug into the workings of all 50 states and graded them, from A to F, on detailed score sheets. The national average was B-minus, the same as in the previous study in 2005, but as the Pew people told me, "the expectations were higher across the board this year, so it took more to get the same grade." Combining the grades for managing employees, budgets, information systems and infrastructure planning – the four areas of focus – three states were at the top, with A-minus ratings: Utah, Virginia and Washington. At the bottom were Rhode Island and New Hampshire, scored C-minus and D-plus, respectively.
(California earned a C. The full results are available in the March issue of Governing magazine and pewcenteronthestates.org/gpp.) At the briefing, Neal Johnson, the director of the project, remarked that "a new generation of governors is focusing on management," in part because citizens are so skeptical of government, but also because tough economic times demand it and because their own backgrounds point them in that direction.
The first two governors he mentioned were Indiana Republican Mitch Daniels, the former head of the federal Office of Management and Budget, and New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine, the former director of a giant Wall Street investment bank. Both are accustomed to measuring by results.
Two governor-managers were present for the briefing. Michigan Democrat Jennifer Granholm said she begins each workday in Lansing with reports from "my team" on the status of the benchmark goals they have set out to accomplish that week.
Georgia Republican Sonny Perdue recounted how, upon taking office in 2003, he recruited teams of businessmen to evaluate state agencies, telling them he wanted not voluminous reports but "actionable, 90-day steps" to improve services. So far, he said, they have produced 80 suggestions, among them systems that Perdue said have yielded $100 million a year in procurement savings and have cut the wait time for obtaining a driver's license to 10 minutes.
