Performance Metrics for Emergency Management

Performance metrics have been around government for quite some time, maybe ten years or more.  It started with City Stats and has spread across the nation to other governments.  I struggled with performance metrics for emergency management when I was in King County.  The challenge is not just recording "outputs" but measuring "outcomes."  An output might be the number of people trained, which I call "butts in seats."  The outcome is how much better they were able to do their jobs because of the training.  There you can see the problem in trying to measure that--especially in emergency management when the skills being trained are not used that frequently in many cases and the circumstances can be radically different.

 

As is normal, what got me thinking about this was an article I read.  This time it was Government Technology and the topic is How Governments Are Developing Better Performance Metrics  What I liked about this article is it gave a couple of examples (not emergency management of course) and then went on to discuss the monitoring and  tweaking of measurements on an ongoing basis.  You can't just establish metrics and walk away.  Like everything else, you need to measure if you are measuring the right data/outcomes.  For those of you looking to establish performance measurements this might be a good quick read.

 

Someday I look forward to reading about an emergency management organization that has done a bang-up job of establishing performance metrics.  Anybody out there think they have already cut the Gordian Knotof metrics?