Synthetic Performance Indicators for Residential Housing Agencies

Many public administrations produce and distribute public services through a number of similar local autonomous organizations, or institutions, operating in different parts of the territory assigned to them under a centralized authority. Examples of this are the public residential housing institutions, the institutions for waste disposal, health care institutions, and education institutions. The problem arises regarding the evaluation of the performance of these local organizations and institutions not in absolute but in relative terms, in order to determine what incentives or sanctions should be meted out to them. This study presents the methodological problems, the data analysis and the initial results of the method adopted by the Lombardy Region to create a system of performance indicators that will permit an automatic ranking of the Residential Housing Agencies in Lombardy (ALER) according to their performance, based on information from their balance sheets. A performance index was devised by rationally combining the results of three different analyses: POSITION ANALYSIS, RANKING ANALYSIS and SCORING ANALYSIS. The results allowed the central administration to (i) motivate the managers of the local units through a system of performance-based incentives, (ii) aggregate poorly performing local units or outsource inefficient functions, and (iii) create competition among local units and raise overall performance levels.