Transforming Government with SAS Strategic Performance Management

Have you ever watched a flock of birds in flight and marvelled at their ability to swiftly change direction in one skilfully executed manoeuvre after another? Have you ever thought it was possible to see such unity in the performance of a large group of people in the workplace?

Instead of feeling mired in the daily tasks handed down by an “ivory tower” hierarchy, what if every single person knew precisely how his or her job fitted into the strategic goals of the organisation as a whole? Now, imagine the motivation that would result if all members, on every level of an organisation, knew that their work mattered and that the results of their performance were measured as key performance indicators (KPIs). With the ability to monitor KPIs daily and communicate how these relate to an organisation’s strategy, this concept can become reality.

Strategic planning, KPIs, improved efficiency, performance and customer satisfaction are ideas that are critical to the public sector today. Now more than ever government agencies around the world are being challenged to operate on tighter budgets while increasing the efficiency of their organisations.

Savvy public administrators know that to overcome these challenges and keep their programmes operating, the entire organisation must be strategy-focussed. Public-sector enterprises are adopting a variety of performance management strategies, including balanced scorecard, Six Sigma and EFQM, to save money on operating costs. They’re doing this by monitoring KPIs and creating a flow of communication that is both horizontal and vertical.

In their book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton state, “While the initial focus and application of the balanced scorecard has been in the for-profit (private) sector, the opportunity for the scorecard to improve the management of governmental and not-for-profit enterprises is, if anything, even greater.”

Clearly, public-sector entities share some definite parallels with commercial organisations that operate for a profit. They have annual budgets, objectives to achieve and the need to produce complex reports. They also must factor in suppliers, customers and employees when working toward the organisation’s goals. With SAS solutions, a public sector organisation can harness knowledge about its suppliers, its customers and the organisation itself, then communicate useful intelligence to the appropriate people. SAS Strategic Performance Management, which is certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, is a powerful solution for turning strategies into action by enabling an organisation to operate with unity toward the success of well-understood objectives.

Disappearing rapidly are the outdated information retrieval methods of the past. By necessity, they are being replaced with more sophisticated reporting solutions. To create a strategic plan and execute it effectively, it’s crucial to be able to monitor KPIs and make intelligence available to the right people and at the right time. SAS can access any IT platform or system and poses no integration issues. This is important because public sector data legacies are often huge, and may be stored on a wide variety of systems, dating from many previous administrations.

In many ways, the flexibility of SAS Strategic Performance Management is tailored to the unique challenges of the public sector. It can help organisations develop strategies to address the unique challenges they face with issues such as regulation compliance, deregulation, security and protection of personal privacy, to name just a few.

Working better and with fewer resources is the paradigm shift that is occurring in public sectors all over the world. Evolving expectations from multiple stakeholders — service recipients, employees, funding authorities, communities and taxpayers — have brought about a new way of doing business throughout the public sector. Progressive public administrators are using SAS Strategic Performance Management to create real intelligence from volumes of data from a variety of sources. SAS enables them to achieve strategic objectives, save money and comply with regulations, all while responding more quickly to the ever-changing needs of the public.