We must improve public agency productivity in order to meet the growing
needs of urban residents. To do so, we need good public sector productivity
measures, because without them we can neither evaluate agencies' productivity
nor help inefficient agencies to improve. Generally accepted public productivity
indicators are rare, however, because public organizations usually produce multiple
types of outputs that are not easily summarized. Darold Barnum has used Data Envelopment Analysis
(DEA) to develop summary indicators that both measure public agency productivity and
identify efficient agencies that can be emulated by their less-productive peers.
In this presentation, Dr. Barnum will explain how DEA works, then give examples from some of his scholarship
work conducted at GCI that has applied DEA to urban transit, hospital pharmacies, and electric utilities.
Dr. Barnum will reserve a significant amount of time to spend in answering your questions and helping you to
identify those outputs and inputs from your type of agency that could be used with DEA.
Dr. Barnum has partnered with local, state, and federal agencies in efforts to understand and
improve the performance of urban organizations. As part of his GCI scholarship, he is partnering
internally with academic researchers from Urban Planning and Public Affairs, Engineering, Medicine,
Dentistry and Mathematics, and externally with Consorta (a 530-hospital healthcare purchasing
and resource management cooperative), Sisters of St. Francis Health Services (which runs about
a dozen hospitals), the Division of Medicine and Dentistry, Health Resources and Services
Administration, HHS (which oversees federally qualified health centers across the U.S.), and the
Chicago Transit Authority. Dr. Barnum has trained many public sector managers, including managers
from more than 230 urban transit organizations representing more than 90 percent of U.S. urban
transit service, and has published 5 research monographs and over 70 papers.
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