The state of the States: Benchmarking in America

After delivering his presentation at the Performance Networks Seminar in Blackpool, we spoke to Gerald Young, Senior Management Associate at the International City/County Management Association, about the challenges of benchmarking stateside.

For those involved in benchmarking, there’s a natural curiosity about how such initiatives are pursued elsewhere and what the data show. In the case of the United States, there’s also much more than a single answer.

Although organised benchmarking programs have been around for decades, there has been limited agreement on how to coordinate those efforts. The most ambitious of those programs was the ICMA Centre for Performance Management, which began in 1994 and collected data on as many as 5,000 metrics – ranging from efficiency, timeliness, quality, and satisfaction to descriptive information about how services were being delivered or what policies might affect their administration.

While that effort peaked at participation from about 230 jurisdictions, it was hampered in part by the attempted comprehensiveness of its scope. Even where two jurisdictions might commit to responding to as many of the measures as they could, they might find that there was very little alignment on which measures those were, and as a result, very spotty results with which to compare.

To rectify that situation, a national Insights program followed, paring the list of metrics to 950, while adding big data visualisations and predictive analytics to facilitate better understanding and forecasting. Even that number, however, proved too daunting for the majority of cities and counties, 59% of which were still not doing any internal measurement, let alone benchmarking with others.

In an attempt to lower the barriers to entry, ICMA has shifted to a new Open Access Benchmarking programme that is limited to 80 metrics. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather provide at least a sampling of comparison data across a range of key services. 

This open approach is also helpful to participants in the regional benchmarking initiatives being undertaken around the country. Some of these have attempted broad participation statewide, such as the Florida Benchmarking Consortium and university-based efforts in North Carolina and Tennessee. Others have focused on a single metropolitan area, such as the Valley Benchmark Cities program around Phoenix, Arizona, or a new effort in the Chicago suburbs. While each of these efforts had access to its own pool of data, they had little ability to compare outside those borders. The open access model is based on a nationwide set of agreed-upon definitions that can be used to expand the list of potential comparisons.

State and local governments are often called the laboratories of democracy, and they act as such not only in experimenting with new approaches, but also in sharing their findings with their peers. In benchmarking, the metrics are being shared online, the structures are being replicated around the country, and, in the case of the Valley Benchmark Cities, actually being adapted from the Ontario Benchmarking Program that’s since become the Canadian standard.

At ICMA’s 2017 conference in San Antonio, Texas, Annalisa Haskell, the New South Wales Executive Director for Local Government Professionals Australia, spoke about an effort to expand that information sharing to involve Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK. Debbie Johns of APSE is also an active partner in that effort as our respective organizations look for ways to find common ground on key metrics

In this time of heightened awareness of workplace diversity issues, among the metrics that’s part of the list for international comparison is the proportion of chief executives by gender. Among ICMA members, the percentage of female CEOs in 2016 had risen to 15%, just slightly ahead of where that figure stood in 1981. The data to come from comparing such statistics can help inform recruitment and retention policies in all participating countries.

Having attended the APSE performance networks seminar in Blackpool, I was able to join a discussion on succession planning, during which one of the attendees mentioned, in no uncertain terms, how poor their succession planning is. Aside from being a frank admission of the challenge we all face, it brought to mind for me a recent succession planning study completed by the Centre for State and Local Government Excellence.

Whether it’s by exchanging such case studies, encouraging US managers to learn more about the performance network award winners, or passing along links to ICMA award winners, there’s plenty we can all learn by greater networking, and I look forward to continuing the discussions.

• You can access the ICMA’s planning study here.

• For more information about how your authority can use benchmarking data to improve service delivery, contact performance networks at [email protected].