Delivering and measuring success in the public sector

Citation

Seow, C. and Wisniewski, M. (2011), "Delivering and measuring success in the public sector", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 24 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpsm.2011.04224daa.001

Delivering and measuring success in the public sector

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Public Sector Management, Volume 24, Issue 4

Public sector organisations worldwide are under increasing pressure to deliver and demonstrate success in terms of both service delivery and organisational performance. However, research and practice in this context in the public sector is still at the exploratory stage. It requires a sharing of what works, what does not and the development and application of new thinking and new knowledge.

The sequence of articles begins with a paper from Aki Jääskeläinen and Antti Lönnqvist entitled “Public service productivity: how to capture outputs?”, which highlights the challenge in examining service productivity and how a disaggregated approach could lead to a better understanding of different output components that could contribute towards designing-in relevant productive measures for operative level management.

Rodney McAdam, Tim Walker and Shirley-Ann Hazlett, in a paper entitled “An inquiry into the strategic-operational role of performance management in local government”, explore the implementation of structured change methods and performance measurement and management initiatives and in the process attempt to address as to whether such structured change methods transcend the strategic-operational divide.

Belinda Luke, Kate Kearins and Martie-Louise Verreynne’s paper “The risks and returns of new public management: political business” reflects on accountability in financial returns and risks of new public management (NPM) in New Zealand’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Their investigation highlights several dimensions of risks that should be contemplated with regards to the operations of SOEs.

The following two papers highlight specific tools deployed in the public sector that contribute towards the decision-making process about allocation of resources.

Harry Barton and Malcolm Beynon continue on the NPM theme through their paper “Targeted criteria performance improvement: an investigation of a ‘most similar’ UK police force”, which describes the impact of NPM on the police service in the UK. Harry and Malcolm demonstrate PROMETHEE, a ranking technique to address complex and multi-facetted operational issues in police forces, in this instance the effectiveness of the police service in terms of sanction detection levels.

Michael McFadden and Toni-Lee Porter draw the Special Issue to a close with their paper entitled “Australian Federal Police drug investigations: benefit-cost analysis”, which introduces another approach – benefit-cost analysis – as a complementary tool in the decision-making process in the allocation of resources and in the determining of the social impact of policies.

This Guest Editorial concludes with our thanks to Joyce Liddle, Editor of International Journal of Public Sector Management, for enabling us to initiate such a call for papers, to the authors who responded enthusiastically to this call, and finally, to our set of dedicated reviewers whose spent a significant amount of time providing critical, detailed and constructive feedback.

Christopher Seow, Mik WisniewskiGuest Editors