During this two-part seminar we will be discussing the meaning of “success” in a regulatory environment and the associated challenges of performance measurement and management. Professional regulators and law-enforcement officials certainly deal with customers, and so the normal range of customer-service metrics has some relevance for them. But their principal business is to deliver protections to society against various classes of harm, and towards that end they deliver and, where necessary, enforce obligations, influence behaviours, and manage compliance. The nature of “success” to be pursued and assessed is therefore quite different in the “protective” role of government than in service-provision roles.

Many public agencies select three or four metrics they think are particularly important, and designate them as “Key Performance Indicators,” drawing to them an inordinate amount of internal and external attention. Sometimes this focus can have perverse effects and bias operations in a way that is not quite as valuable as executives intended and may even distort operations in a way that is contrary to the public interest.

For regulators, much attention is typically paid to functional outputs (such as inspection or audit rates), to the rates at which agents discover or detect non-compliance, and to process metrics such as timeliness and accuracy of decision making. Connecting these measures to each other, and to valuable social outcomes, remains a complex puzzle.

This seminar provides an opportunity for attendees to assess their own organisation’s traditions in performance measurement and reporting, and—where necessary—to identify opportunities to broaden the range of indicators and analyses in a way that will enable their agency to present a more rounded and meaningful picture of their contributions to society. 

Professor of the Practice of Public Management, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Malcolm K Sparrow is a leading international expert in regulatory and enforcement strategy, security and risk control. Malcolm is the Professor of the Practice of Public Management at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government and he is Faculty Chair of the school’s executive program “Strategic Management of Regulatory and Enforcement Agencies.”

Professor Sparrow served 10 years with the British Police Service, rising to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. He has conducted internal affairs investigations, commanded a tactical firearms unit, and has extensive experience with criminal investigation. His research interests include regulatory and enforcement strategy, fraud control, corruption control, and operational risk management. He is also a patent-holding inventor and deadly serious at tennis.