How Organisations Measure Success: The Use of Performance Indicators in Government

Throughout the 1980s, the British Civil Service made enormous efforts towards developing indicators to measure the performance of government.How Organisations Measure Successanalyzes these methods from their origins in the 1960s to their revival in the 1980s. Neil Carter, Rudolf Klein and Patricia Day predict that this trend--with its emphasis on accountability and performance--is likely to continue in the future as government continues to delegate activities to agencies and as it looks for methods to assess their performance.How Organisations Measure Successalso provides a comprehensive examination of the natural history of performance indicators across a variety of government departments, public agencies and private businesses. The findings illuminate problems of both design and implementation and highlight other issues including the implications of performance indicators for democratic accountability.