In order to improve something, you have to change it. In order to change something, you have to understand it. In order to understand something, you have to measure it.

Local government leaders have truly been agonizing over how to balance their budgets, many times dramatically cutting services as times have gotten tough, and wishing they had more – or perhaps better – data about the efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of the services they provide. Many finance officers, city council members, county board members, and citizens wonder how the service performance of their communities actually compares to that of other local governments.

Collaborative leadership groups such as the Florida Benchmarking Consortium (FBC) can help provide the answers. The FBC and other statewide and regional benchmarking efforts help local government leaders, citizens, university leaders, and the various industries of local government to have more meaningful conversations about local government’s most important priorities and where improvement efforts need to be focused. These groups collect and share data, using standardized performance measures that allow member local governments to benchmark the efficiency, quality, and effectiveness of their services as compared to those of other FBC members.

The Florida Experience
The FBC’s membership has grown quickly and steadily to include participation by leaders from 49 of Florida’s like-minded local governments. About 40% are counties, and the rest are cities, along with two fairly specialized organizations, the Keys Aqueduct and Toho Water authorities. Participants in these self-selected jurisdictions have joined forces to develop common performance measures for their highest-priority local government services. Each member organization and their participants choose the extent to which they want to be involved in the FBC, including their leadership contributions and the amount of performance data they contribute.

Since January 2005, the FBC has grown from a fairly simple collaboration-based, concept in the minds of a small number of local government professionals to the largest active statewide or regional local government performance measurement and benchmarking-focused consortium in the United States. A board of directors made up of leaders from member governments directs the group’s activities.

Early on, FBC leaders realized that support from a respected university system would be necessary for at least two reasons – the group would eventually need academic research power, and universities are where future local government leaders are born.

The University of North Carolina’s pioneering work in benchmarking made it clear that the FBC needed strategic business partners in one of Florida’s leading universities, and the FBC has been fortunate to be able to work with innovative leaders from the University of Central Florida (UCF) Institute of Government for internal consulting, networking, and administrative support; the UCF College of Health and Public Affairs, teaching the basics of performance measurement and benchmarking, researching options for organizational leadership next steps, and helping to select university student leaders to work with the FBC; and the UCF Center for Community Partnerships for building and expanding the FBC’s network of volunteer citizen leaders statewide. The FBC is also blessed with two great corporate sponsors who provide leading performance management software solutions for local governments, ActiveStrategy and Covalent Software.

Another key ingredient to the FBC model is that the consortium has strategically tried to offer its performance measurement and benchmarking services for the lowest price possible. Most other national, regional, and state-level organizations of this type charge from several to many thousands of dollars per year for local government memberships, the FBC’s annual membership fee is $1,000 for any Florida local government.

Participation, like membership, increases steadily each year. Currently, more than 60 percent of the FBC’s member organizations provide some amount of performance data. And more members are providing performance measurement data in each category of performance measurement every year.

The FBC has found that local government leaders appreciate being shown how to do this sort of performance measurement work through real-life examples, many times using trial and error learning, and by taking things one step at a time. Members tend to get more and more involved over time as they learn about how to proceed, begin to trust the process, and become more comfortable with it. The result is better, more relevant, and therefore more meaningful information to use in decision making in local government organizational systems that are properly prepared to accept, and in time to embrace it.

Working Together
The small beach communities, rural counties, and fast paced urban areas that belong to the FBC come together each year to agree on the performance measures jointly considered the most critical to everyone’s success. All members must make sure they are measuring and collecting performance data in standard ways to ensure the reliability, comparability, and integrity of the FBC’s performance data. FBC members have to trust each other through the repeated cycles of effort and learning involved in data cleansing, fine-tuning performance measurement definitions, sharing data and learning from each local government’s best practices.

The Achilles’ heel of performance measurement has long been that each organization does its own thing. Many Florida governments collect performance measurement data using their own definitions, employing their own metrics and timeframes, and consequently, the data collected by one government cannot reasonably be compared with the data collected by another. This makes legitimate benchmarking difficult. FBC is working to make comparisons easier, leading discussions about comparative results that are more meaningful than simply looking at one’s own numbers over time or looking at other’s numbers without understanding those other local government systems more intimately (both qualitatively and quantitatively).

Service Areas
The FBC has developed efficiency, effectiveness and quality measures with common definitions, understandable metrics, and data collection timeframes thus far across 14 areas of local government work.

Each year, the FBC collects and publishes this information so member local governments can use it for their own benchmarking purposes.

Each of the FBC’s performance measurement systems or service areas is led by a proven, well-respected local government professional from one of the FBC’s member local government organizations. They know their fields better than budget analysts, assistant city managers, university professors, or organizational development experts can. These leaders make all the difference in the FBC’s ability to determine the most important measures and the most sensible way to analyze the performance data received, and in rigorously cleansing the data each year.

Conclusions
There continues to be a great deal of talk about performance, including “managing with data,” “data-driven decision making,” “managing for results,” “benchmarking performance,” “performance budgeting”, and “mining best practices.” Even though performance measurement and benchmarking practices have been around for some time, these tools truly remain under-developed and under-used in most local government circles.

The FBC’s leaders have dedicated themselves to working collaboratively together, and jointly learning how to employ performance management tools in ways that will benefit the organizations they serve and bring ever increasing value to our communities. The FBC’s leaders are always proud to share both the organization’s trials and its successes with anyone who may be working to improve the services of local governments. When serving as local government leaders all of us need to work together – keeping an open mind.

When we continue to try managing our organizations in new and better ways we will learn from each other what works best.