OLYMPIA, Sept. 10.—Promising a “faster, smarter and more accountable state government,” Gov. Jay Inslee Tuesday formally launched his administration’s new strategic-planning effort – one of two big management initiatives that aim to bring business principles to the public’s business.
Odds are you’ve already heard about the other one. Inslee has been touting lean management since he ran for governor in 2012. It is a bottoms-up approach to rethinking state services, and it is the wellspring for all campaign claims that a more efficient government might free up resources in these cash-short times. Results Washington is a different thing entirely — it starts from the top down. Rather more jaded denizens of the state’s capital city might observe that virtually every governor of the last 50 years has announced some sort of a business-inspired good-government efficiency program, and results have generally ranged from the modest to the hard-to-detect. Yet strategic planning is something that hasn’t been tried before on this scale in Washington state, and certainly never in tandem with a second program that works the same problem in the opposite direction.
Inslee has high hopes. “This leadership team has an understanding that we want to use data, because you can improve what you can measure, and what you don’t measure, you can’t improve.”
All About Measurements
Basically, the whole thing is about measurements. Results Washington establishes five goals for state government, and all of them have sort of a motherhood-and-apple-pie sound. A world-class education system, a prosperous economy, sustainable energy and a clean environment, healthy and safe communities, and effective, efficient and accountable government. Odds are no one would quibble with any of them.
But what the strategic planning process does is to establish benchmarks by which the state might measure its progress. The goals are broken down into subcategories. Then out come the measuring sticks. Under transparency and accountability in government, for example, one goal is to increase the percentage of agencies and higher education institutions posting contract data on the Web from zero percent to 100 percent by 2015. And so on.
Tuesday’s announcement basically fleshed out a program Inslee Administration officials have been describing for months, for the first time revealing benchmarks they plan to measure – 205 so far, according to a draft distributed to reporters.
Data about the state’s progress will be posted online, using Web-based tools developed by Socrata GovStat, said Inslee chief of staff Mary Alice Heuschel, who has had charge of the project. If the state fails to meet a goal or its progress falls short, an “improvement plan” will be required. And what distinguishes this from previous goal-setting and performance-measuring exercises, she said, is that this one involves the entirety of state government, rather than specific goals for specific agencies. “It involves all state agencies and will gauge how well the state as a whole is making progress on the goals,” she said.
Six-and-a-Half Million Stakeholders
At this stage the plan still feels a bit rough. The planning document presented to reporters Tuesday had plenty of blanks – for instance, under the “resource stewardship” subgoal in the government category, the state aims to increase the percentage of alternative-fuel vehicles in the state fleet from “X percent to X percent” – the numbers to be filled in later. Some categories still are largely a matter of X-work, including the year by which the goals are to be achieved – always by “20XX.”
But such is to be expected, Inslee said. It has taken this long just to decide what the goals are to be, and the ways in which the progress is to be measured. “This is a draft,” Inslee observed. Over the next six weeks the governor’s office will be seeking public comment about its goals and its measurement process. Inslee said his office hopes to have everything locked down by November. From that point it is a matter of recording results and identifying trouble spots. It’s going to take a while to see results, he said; most data will be updated on an annual basis.
And while some doubters have noted that to this point the program is a state-government creation, drafted by government officials without input from stakeholder groups, Inslee said he hopes the public-comment period will broaden the participation. “Look, we had to start somewhere,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “We wanted to put some numbers on paper and identify some goals to start the discussion. And when you say stakeholders, that is six-and-a-half million stakeholders, and I’m asking all six-and-a-half million stakeholders in the state of Washington to give us your input about these. Are we setting the right level of goal? Are they ambitious enough? Have we missed certain ones?
“I’m glad we’re having the discussion today, because we want as broad of feedback as we possibly can get.”
The latest draft is online at www.results.wa.gov. The public-comment process begins with a “Twitter Town Hall” on Thursday from 10 to 11 a.m. – people can sign in at @GovInslee and use #ResultsWA to ask questions.
Many Interested Observers
At this point, it’s hard for anyone to see anything to criticize. All the goals are laudable, says Jocelyn McCabe, spokeswoman for the Association of Washington Business. It’s all a matter of detail work. “There are a lot of details that remain to be worked out and the reality is that our folks are still very skeptical, because of the economy and where we are – this is a work in progress and we look forward to working with them on it.”
Some obvious problem points emerge when one looks at the measurements that will be used to establish progress. For instance, the environment plank encompasses the renewable-energy goals established by Initiative 937, which requires utilities to obtain 15 percent of their power from wind and other “renewable” sources by 2020. And given the higher energy costs that will be required to achieve that goal, one might wonder whether the state will be able to reach similarly ambitious targets for economic growth. But those are questions for the years ahead.
And some might wonder at some of the points that will be measured, and their relevance to the overall goal. For instance, one of the measures of “customer satisfaction” in state government is increasing the percentage of state employees satisfied with their jobs – raising the question of who the customer actually is.
A Few Distinctions
Probably worth clarifying is what the program isn’t. It’s not the same thing as previous state government performance-management initiatives, like former Gov. Christine Gregoire’s Government Management and Accountability Program, with which it has some similarity. “This will be a broader and deeper effort, measuring performance across the spectrum of state government,” Inslee said. “It expands the scope of measuring performance in agencies, boards and commissions and increases the frequency of reporting and the level of collaboration amongst state agencies.”
It also isn’t lean management, though the strategic planning effort frequently has been confused with it. In response to another question, Inslee said Results Washington aims to lay out clearly articulated goals with measurement “metrics” to determine progress. “Lean management is more of a tactical way to achieve those goals and how you build an organization to do that,” he said. “Organizations in our state that have embraced those two principles have been incredibly effective. We think state government can do this.”
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