A Systems Approach to Performance-Based Management: The National Drug Control Strategy

Abstract

Government agencies are encouraged to adopt business practices to improve program performance. But there are significant differences between the private and public sectors, both in the nature of the commodities offered and the way people in decision-making roles maximize utility. These differences are likely to affect the success of such endeavors. We examine efforts by the Office of National Drug Control Policy to develop a National Drug Control Strategy. A theoretical model of performance-based management is developed within this context that allows us to identify tensions that are inherent in any system of this kind. Some basic methods for reducing tension are then discussed. Given the generality of the model, it is possible the observations offered here are relevant to other policy problems requiring multi-agency coordination. total quality management (Swiss 1992). In the following sections, we subsume these approaches under the general rubric of performance-based management, and thus refer to all mechanisms that align an organization's operations with the attainment of some set of outcomes. It is fair to say that the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) represented an effort to legislate conformity with the principles of performance-based management (Kimm 1995; Henderson 1995; Rosenbloom 1995 for initial reactions; Radin 1998 for prognostic comments).When an organization adopts performance-based management, it is assumed the behavior of individuals will change in response to a new definition of the situation. The structure provided by a novel set of rules changes the perceived utility of certain kinds of actions. An individual seeking to advance in the private sector soon finds that personal interests are well served by achieving corporate objectives. The GPRA and related efforts assume that a similar phenomenon occurs in the public sector. In its most Ronald Simeone is the president of Simeone Associates, Inc., a private consulting firm specializing in public policy research. He has authored a number of articles on drug and crime control policy, program evaluation, estimation, and computer simulation. He served at the policy level in the State of New York for 14 years and was one of the principal architects of the Performance Measures of Effectiveness PME system developed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The Administrative Presidency as Reactive Oversight: Implications for Positive and Normative Theory

“…Recent presidents have shown a similar lack of interest in centralized planning by other units within the EOP. Efforts by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to develop a comprehensive performance management system have been driven exclusively by Congress, for example, and those involved in that process make no mention of presidential guidance or encouragement (Murphy and Carnevale ; Simeone, Carnevale, and Miller ). This lack of executive support plausibly helps explain why the ONDCP has struggled to overcome the centrifugal forces within the executive branch that have undermined the planning and coordination of drug control efforts across the bureaucracy.…”

Making Performance Measurement Relevant? Administrators’ Attitudes and Structural Orientations

“…The solutions can be roughly classified into two groups. The first group includes benchmarking or comparative PEM (Folz, 2004;Kopcynski & Lombardo, 1999), the balanced scorecard (Kaplan, 2001), integrating PEM with other management systems (Moynihan & Ingraham, 2003), a systems approach (Grizzle & Pettijohn, 2002;Simeone, Carnevale, & Millar, 2005), and matching PEM with managerial purposes (Behn, 2003). The second group includes citizen-driven PEM (Epstein, Coates, & Wray, 2006;Ho & Coates, 2004), linking PEM with political accountability (Wang, 2002), using PEM for double-loop policy learning (Moynihan, 2005), and measuring fairness (Jennings, 2005).…”

A review of exploring collaboration and learning about climate change adaptation in BREEAM Communities

“…According to [12] the system approach is known as a strategy that can be used to explore the systems functionality and response towards various changes, and it is constructed on the base that the understanding of the system responses should be done in a comprehensive way and not in isolated components. The system approach framework has been utilised by various scientists and resource managers to better recognise the ramifications of the management studies [13], with roots in early work in biology, cybernetics, economics, mathematics, and information theory [14]. Literature shows that the system approach components and characteristics have advantages to guide the sustainability process, as the following points indicate: System design & organization: The system approach concentrates on the organization of the system as one structure or as an entity [15], by the integrity of its components [16].…”

“…Ermoliev [18] for instance, demonstrates that using system approach can be effective for the management of a basin's environmental system, through its incorporation of individual system components and their interaction. Interaction among components and operation: When a problem occurs, and there is a need to conceiving it in a systemic term, the concern is mainly about the way the components work together/interact to achieve a particular target [14]. These interactions, as demonstrated by [18], are complicated not only because they simultaneously involve various system components but because they dynamically occur over time.…”