Public Value

There’s a lot of help out there for those of us in private enterprise who are wondering about how to measure the value of our IT operations. But what about those in public or non-profit organizations?

You might want to consider the concept of Public Value first articulated by Moore at Harvard in 1995, and then further elaborated by international entities such as the World Bank; European entities such as the IDABC, and private organisations, the Gartner Group in particular. A number of frameworks for measuring the Public Value of IT have been proposed, all of which tend to share three conceptual elements:

• Financial and organizational value – this element is closest to the classic techniques of value determination already known in the private sector, such as measures of financial Return on Investment, as well as more qualitatively valued improvements in architecture and organisation.
• Political value – this element assesses the value of achieving policy-related goals, such as the degree of implementation of laws and directives related to IT-readiness;
• Constituent value – this element captures the value of the improved end user experience, in terms of decreased administrative burden, more inclusive public services, and so forth. This of the Standard Cost Model for reduction of administrative burden and similar initiatives.

From my point of view, the best thing about the concept of Public Value is that it makes a correct separation of the different dimensions of value into something you can work with. I’ll get back to this later.