CSC Helps Federal Public Service Implement a Powerful Performance Management Tool

The Belgian Federal Public Service (FPS) Finance has about 30,000 employees in various departments spread throughout the country. A 1998 initiative to streamline performance management within the FPS established a dedicated Performance Measurement Cell. An initial inventory in the fiscal departments’ field organizations showed that several performance measurement initiatives had already been taken. "A lot of information was gathered and statistics made available," reports Claude Schoenaers, who leads the FPS Performance Management Department, which has evolved out of the original Performance Measurement Cell. "But the question remained of how to use these statistics in decision-making processes," Schoenaers continues. "Another obstacle was the hodge-podge of formats in which the information was presented."

Assistance of a Professional IT Services Provider

To provide a practical, comprehensive overview of performance indicators at FPS Finance, the organization needed a countrywide performance measurement system and an effective tool for understanding its results: a Management Dashboard.

Staff of the Performance Measurement Cell recognized the necessity of a uniform approach in designing the performance measurement system. Working with selected correspondents from the field, they analyzed work processes and identified information useful in measuring performance, then defined and validated a number of performance indicators. This work ultimately resulted in strategic and management objectives for each department.

With those objectives in place, implementation of the dashboard could begin. Schoenaers' Performance Management Department took the lead. They realized that the assistance of an experienced IT service provider was key to the success of the technical implementation. CSC became their partner.


Experience-based Technology Selection

Michel Martin, Project Leader for Information and Communications Technologies at FPS Finance, participated in the selection of CSC. “We didn’t take the decision lightly,” he says. “Thirteen firms responded to our request for proposal. We short-listed six of them and asked them to make a prototype in three weeks' time. CSC turned out to be the best candidate. They had made a great effort to really understand our needs and reflect them in the technology. They proposed to use SAS because it is scalable, in both size and function. Their demonstration made plain what they thought the solution would look like, which is one of the aspects that convinced us to work with them.”

Close Working Relationship

The total solution developed by CSC and FPS comprises gathering information, presenting it in various formats, assuring its quality, consolidating it, and creating reports. Michel Martin observes, “The single-package approach enabled us to develop the Management Dashboard and expedite operations. It also contributes to cost and training efficiency, since we only have to master one technology. Last but not least, the solution is very user friendly. The Management Dashboard is accessible via intranet. This means no loss of time for our IT team. Installing the solution once gave all users access through their standard browser. The user interfaces are very straightforward. The information is presented in a clear and well organized manner.”

“Working with CSC is a positive experience," says Claude Schoenaers. "CSC integrates seamlessly into our organization and respects our work methods. The CSC consultants and our people form a unified team. That is what we really appreciate about them.”

From the project's beginning, the team worked to ensure that meetings involving different organizations allowed everyone to have input and give feedback on the decisions made. “CSC was particularly good at translating functional needs into the technology and, guided by the philosophy that people implement programs, explaining to non-technical people the scope and limitations of the technology,” Schoenaers observes.

Very Successful First Phase

The first phase of the Management Dashboard project consisted of a pilot. One model was created for each of six fiscal administrative department -- customs administration, fiscal administration, land registry administration, and so on. “This pilot obviously only gives us a very scattered view of the processes, but it was our goal to test its feasibility,” explains Claude Schoenaers. CSC completed this phase, as expected, within six months.

Initial first results were positive. Schoenaers reports, "One example of what we can now measure is the running time between the deposition of a legal act and its completion. This will be important in a later phase to monitor customer satisfaction, for instance. In the mean time, our people in the field don’t have any extra work. The SAS-based tool simply uses the information they already input during their daily work and processes it."

Jean-Claude Laes, President of the FPS Finance Board of Directors, concludes enthusiastically, “CSC helped us build the foundation for user-friendly performance measurement, which should result in improved service levels at the Federal Public Service Finance in the near future.”