Social Media Performance Measures

Here is an interesting story about the Washington Post trying to adjust to the digital age. "Employees are schooled in the lingo of web traffic."  (p.2)  Interesting things to note:

• 35 different daily reports track traffic to different parts of the web site
• Editors receive a performance alert each day telling them whether the site is on track to meet its traffic goals
• Even if traffic is low to some pages, if the online visitor is from a government suffix web site, who they consider a main audience, they will support those pages

Makes me wonder how government should be looking at traffic.

Assigning blame where it belongs

Steve Duin, a columnist in the Oregonian, wrote today about a settlement with the family of a man who died as a result of his actions and those of public officials after his arrest. Many were involved including the arresting officers, jail staff, and the ambulance personnel. The columnist worries that without the exercise of a trial that will assign blame, there will be no motivation to change. I think there should be accountability in the system, but does assigning blame motivate employees to change?

An audit steps back and looks at the structure that allowed employees to make bad decisions. When I meet with auditees, I always tell them we are auditing a program's or service's performance, not the employee's performance. What was the tone at the top or the climate that allowed police to believe that a man urinating in a trendy neighborhood required a forceful police reaction? Are police trained to recognize that sometimes a person's actions can be the result of mental illness? Do personnel treat all medical emergencies with the same urgency and care? What is the procedure for medical personnel at the jail to make medical decisions? Should medical personnel at the jail and police reassess a person's medical condition before transporting to a hospital to determine the current urgency of the situation? Training, procedures, and the management climate can make for better outcomes. An audit would review all of those and assign blame, but not to the individual, instead to the services that failed. Then maybe there would be change.

Auditing process and ignoring science

I was led to this report after reading a post by Kari Chisholm on the BlueOregon blog. The post describes the political battle that occurred over a nomination to the Department of the Interior and a hold put on that nomination by Senator Ron Wyden who asked for a report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). A year later in mid-December 2008 the report was issued. While the politics were interesting; from an auditor's perspective I found the methodology used to complete the investigation just as interesting.

Many times in audits, we struggle with how to audit something that is less than concrete. This audit reminds me how that is done-through the elements of a finding. The objective of the investigation was to determine if endangered species decisions had been improperly influenced by the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.

Criteria: The methodology was to see if policies and procedures were followed. The OIG reviewed 20 Endangered Species Act decisions. The OIG conducted 89 interviews with employees and reviewed over 20,000 emails and other documents and sent out a standardized questionnaire to all of the US Fish and Wildlife Services regions.

Condition: The investigation found a policy void and lack of guidance. One interviewee stated that there was way too much "informal policy" and that he would wake up in the morning and think, "Okay, what's the agency doing today?" The investigation also noted that this intentional failure to clarify policy had been ongoing through several administrations in order to allow the policy du jour.

Effect: As a result, the Deputy Assistant Secretary in this current administration was able to influence decisions and steer the best available science to pre-ordained ends. She caused significant harm to the integrity of the decision-making process and and its reputation with state and local agencies. The report also stated that there will be considerable cost in undoing some of the decisions and that the actions also caused considerable expenditure in taxpayer dollars for litigation.

Inequality among dogs

I don't know why reading this article made me sad. But it is also a demonstration of the power of criteria. One scientist disputes the findings and only interprets it as a dog reacting to negative circumstances, rather than inequality. But if the one dog hadn't had the knowledge of how the other was being treated better, how would he/she know that these were negative circumstances?