OMB to release metrics for 18 e-gov projects

The Office of Management and Budget on Monday will release the performance metrics of 18 of 25 e-government initiatives as a part of the annual E-Government Report.Karen Evans, OMB’s e-government and IT administrator, today said her office and the project leaders have been working on the metrics for most of 2006 and have come to agreement on what outcome metrics the initiatives should meet.“We are trying to measure what success means,” she said during a meeting of the 2006 Customer Satisfaction Survey annual results held by the Treasury Department’s Federal Consulting Group. “We want measures that show results. We want to increase the usage of the 25 initiatives.”OMB and the project managers have analyzed what that means, and came up with three areas the metrics will focus on:For customer satisfaction, Evans said the metrics will pull directly from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is put together by the University of Michigan and ForeSee Results of Anne Arbor, Mich.In ForeSee’s most recent survey, citizen satisfaction with federal e-government Web sites for 2006 remained at 73.9 out of 100—same as 2005. The final score of the year is slightly up from the third quarter when citizens gave the government a score of 73.7, however it still is below the second quarter score of 74.ForeSee measures satisfaction by randomly surveying selected site visitors and then graded on a 100 point scale.Evans said some projects such as E-Payroll or Federal Asset Sales, will not or do not yet have metrics. OMB and the General Services Administration, which runs Fed Asset Sales, still are working on what the metrics should be. E-Records also is in the same situation.“We are looking at what they need to do next to drive usage, especially for E-Records,” Evans said.Metrics for each of the 18 initiatives will fall into three categories:Evans said some projects already measure customer satisfaction and other metrics, such as GSA’s USA Services, while others still are focused on outputs instead of outcomes, such as number of hits on a Web site.Evans said OMB is releasing the metrics and E-Gov report, in part, because it is the of the