Performance Measurement
It is notoriously difficult to measure the performance of organisations in the service sector. Nick Moore has been associated with work in this area for over 30 years and has developed a robust technique for measuring public library services that has been applied in a wide range of countries.
The work first took shape in the mid-1980s through a consultancy for the Sate Library of Western Australia. Working with Jo Bryson, then of the Western Australia Institute of Technology, Nick developed a simple, easily-applied set of techniques that generated useable results at low cost.
The approach was taken up by IFLA - the International Federation of Library Associations - and Unesco commissioned Nick to develop a generally-applicable set of guidelines. These were published by Unesco in 1989 as Measuring the performance of public libraries (PGI-89/WS/3). They have since been used in many countries and have been translated into a number of different languages.
More recently, we have begun to develop a new approach to the measurement and evaluation of services. Essentially this suggests that the impact of a service needs to be assessed in three different dimensions: perspective, intent and extent:
- Perspective
- concerns the point of view of the actors who are affected by the activity
- Intent
- concerns the degree to which the consequences were intended or accidental. This is clearly associated with the aims and objectives of the activity and with the identification and assessment of unintended consequences
- Extent
- relates to the timescales involved. A development like electronic government, for example, is likely to have an immediate impact on a small community of people; a medium-term impact on a growing number of providers and users, and significant long-term behavioural consequences for all concerned.
This new framework was initially developed in the context of electronic government but it has general applicability and we expect to develop it further.