Government Reform: Goal-Setting and Performance

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on federal agencies' goal-setting and performance measurement efforts and the private sector's performance improvement techniques. GAO noted that: (1) leading organizations have shifted their management focus to meeting customer needs and improving business processes; (2) the benefits offered by information technology to reengineer business processes have led organizations toward attaining substantial performance improvement targets; (3) to meet such targets, organizations systematically measure their performance, benchmark their performance against best industry practices, and use this information to guide all operations; (4) the experiences of leading organizations provide valuable lessons for the federal government as it redesigns its work processes to achieve cost savings and improved services; (5) resource limitations and legislative requirements make the federal government's task of making fundamental performance improvements difficult to achieve; and (6) even if these challenges are faced and met, improvement efforts could take several years to implement.