Benchmarking and performance measurement in public sectors Towards learning for agency effectiveness

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder's interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably ``punch-drunk'' with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)-driven experiences of systems development and failure. Trends in performance measurement in the public sector in the 1990s Performance is a key word permeating all discussion about ``new public management'' (OECD, 1993, p. 7). Part of its attraction is that performance is a broad concept: it has various meanings, for different audiences, in different contexts (Carter, 1991). This makes the design of performance indicators (PIs) in both the private and the public sectors very difficult. Besides the technical problem of operationalizing an abstract concept, the same set of PIs may need to be used to answer questions about the different dimensions of performance. Whereas performance measurement in the private sector is, in general, seen as something normal ± the assumption being that the private sector is imbued