A government agency is one of the crucial subset of the government machinery formed and established with an ultimate aim of performing specific tasks and functions within specific areas.
Government agencies can be easily distinguished from other government departments and other government bodies on the basis of there specific area of operations and performance like advisory, disaster management, intelligence, coordination, etc. Government agencies often go for crisis management to solve their problems as the field in which they are operating requires them to be proactive to assess the conditions and prepare plan of action before the matter get worse. KPIs approach can aid the government agencies to identify and evaluate critical areas to achieve desired goals.
KPIs in this regard can be framed in a four dimensional framework namely, financial perspective, information and knowledge management, team management and operational efficiency. Financial perspective includes percentage government and non-government aiding, percentage public aiding and provides a financial overview of the agencies. Secondly information and knowledge management perspective comprises of KPIs like sources of information, external communication and awareness program, etc. Team management perspective indicates different team activities and constitutes number of crisis management teams, training sessions, percentage experienced members, etc. And the last dimension is operational efficiency which can be used measure the efficiency of the government agencies and includes KPIs like average time taken to solve the crisis, percentage crisis successfully resolved, number of supervisory committees, etc.
The scope of operations for government agencies is very wide which automatically enlarge the number of uncontrollable and uncertain factors they have to deal with and this is one of the biggest and foremost challenges faced by government agencies as every time they have to come up with unique and distinct solutions for different problems.. No one can disagree to the fact there are lot of other agencies apart of government agencies that are operating in certain areas especially in the field of community welfare and providing significant assistance in social welfare. Here the need arises for collaborating the activities of different groups targeting the same goal and this would be considered as another important challenge for the government agencies. This would call for continuous learning about the processes and approaches used by other agencies to deal with extreme conditions. The next challenge faced by government agencies is that they are the subsets of government and they have to cater to the reputation of
the government not only nationally as well as internationally. Another important challenge is that they have a huge task of addressing the psychological expectations of the common man.
KPIs would be extremely beneficial in catering to a variety of problems faced by government agencies and can be evaluated to use as benchmarks in the form of a balanced scorecard. KPIs help in judging the gap between the actual performance and perceived/standard performance and would prescribe the corrective measures required to be taken to fill those gaps.
At the end it would be not be immoral to mention that the operational environment of government agencies is unpredictable and always emerges with new threats and problems. To be effective in this kind of situation, government agencies are slowly but surely moving towards a systematic approach of KPIs. KPIs can be used as a handy tool to manage and encounter and crisis situations faced by them.