Contribution to the definition of a performance measurement methodology for public utility administrations and services
Résumé
The current economic context strengthens the need for public utility administrations to ensure productivity control. This need, that is growing inside the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), has been concretized in France by the promulgation and the installation of a budgetary legal framework named "OLFA" (Organic Law relative to the Finance Act), whose objective is to control the elaboration of the French budget and more precisely its execution at the level of each administration entity (university, police...). In parallel, organizations and in particular public organizations are facing various new challenges, among them, the satisfaction of their partners in an efficient way. To meet such requirements, they have to define a public strategy, to measure the performance of its processes and to analyze its outcomes. Performance and productivity measurement practices are usual in the industrial sector, but are new in the public utility administrations. Public utility administrations are service production organizations concerned de facto by problematics linked to services such as a fuzzy definition, difficulties to model and control service operations, specific service characteristics (Intangibility, Heterogeneity...). An important matter regarding productivity measurement in services and concerns the difficulty to measure service quality and performance because of its characteristics and of the customer involvement in the service delivery process. So, this paper will present first the service specificities, the public utility administration domain and the OLFA concerns. Then, the paper will propose the basis of a performance measurement system as well as concrete recommendations for managers. The work to be done to implement such system is presented in order to improve the appropriateness of the performance measurement system by the civil servants.