Government Performance Management in the UAE
I. Introduction
First of all I would like to highlight that this article is intended for Strategy consultants who would like to have an idea about the Performance Management initiatives in the UAE government. Why UAE? Simply because the UAE has established itself as an undisputed leader in this domain among its neighbors at least. There is a lot to be learned from the initiatives pursued by the leaders of the UAE, which clearly demonstrate a vision which accepts nothing less than governmental excellence.
II. The term “GPM”
Throughout my reading in the domain I have not encountered the term “Government Performance Management” as is. The term is totally derived from the concept of “Corporate Performance Management (CPM)”. However due to the differences in the goals and vision of corporate entities versus Governmental institutions, I decided to use almost the same terminology and switching “Corporate” to “Government”, thus coming up with the acronym “GPM”.
CPM consists mainly of three stages: Crafting/Planning à Execution à Monitoring and Analysis (some prefer to define the phases as Planning à Monitoring à Analysis. However, the first phasing seems to be more logical to me). GPM also consists of pretty much the same phases. However the main difference lies in the Planning stage, and mainly in the strategic planning stage (later I will hit on Strategic vs. Operational planning). When any organization “crafts” a plan, it does so based on its vision and mission. As per the Balanced Scorecards concepts, in order to measure the organization’s performance, the various objectives should be classified under 4 main categories:
1- Financial
2- Customer
3- Learning & Growth
4- Business Process
For Norton and Kaplan not only it was a sin to change the names or the classifications, but initially it was also another sin to change the order of these quadrants. This is the core difference between CPM and GPM. For GPM, the Customer (who is actually the “Citizen”) lies on top of all the quadrants, while the financials quadrant lie in the bottom, as it’s purely a means, not an end for Governments (obviously the opposite is totally true for corporate organizations). Therefore the quadrants under GPM are:
1- Citizens
2- Processes
3- Learning & Growth
4- Financials
III. GPM in the UAE
As I mentioned earlier, in this article I will focus on the GPM experience in the UAE. In future articles I hope I will be able to get into the GPM in general, mostly from a technical perspective (many strategy experts – which I’m not – have discussed the Performance Management concepts from pure business angles). The goal of my articles will be to assists Heads of Strategy Divisions, or IT manager, in government entities to form a general idea about the technical solution that will assist them in all the phases of the GPM lfecycle.
The United Arab Emirates is a gulf country that consist of seven emirates. Each emirate has its own internal rules and policies, which are all governed by the federal government of the UAE. Therefore when we talk about GPM in the UAE, we should be considering two levels: Federal and Local.
The first GPM initiative was implemented on the federal government level. It is embodied in a system called: Adaa (i.e. “Performance” in Arabic). The system was launched by His Highness the Prime Minister Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum during Gitex 2008. The system made a big noise in the media when it was launched, as it was announced as a new era for the governmental performance in the UAE. Adaa was owned and managed by the Prime Minster Office. Its main task is to provide UAE officials with visibility into the performance of Federal ministries and authorities.
All federal entities have secure access to Adaa in order to upload their plans and results. ON an annual basis, and towards the end of the year, all federal entities are requested to upload their operational plans for the following year. They include the initiatives and KPI’s that should be achieved. All these initiatives are linked to higher level initiatives set at the strategic level. For the UAE, this strategic level consists of 3-year periods. Therefore each strategic plan should eventually include three operational plans.
On a quarterly basis, federal entities are requested to upload their quarterly achievement for the previous quarter. At the moment this is done manually, i.e. the actual performance percentages are logged manually. In future phases this shall be automated via integration with other systems (more info about Adaa phases in future articles). Now that actual are logged in Adaa, the prime minister and other authorized officials have access to end-to-end reports about the performance of the federal government entities. Best performing entities are then announced and honored in public.
IV. Adaa – Technical Overview
Adaa was a one of the main systems implemented by Microsoft Consulting Services. The technology used was mainly Microsoft PerformancePoint Server (PPS). At the time of the implementation, PerformancePoint was still a stand-alone product, whereas now it’s called PerformancePoint “Services”, which is part of the leading Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Different modules of PPS were used to build:
· the Data Models and the Dimensions on one side
· and the dashboards, including the scorecards, reports, and strategy maps. Analytical capabilities such as filtering and drill-down are provided as well.
Since Arabic is the official language of the country, the system had to support full Arabic dashboards. This was also taken care of by Microsoft and the team who developed the solution.
At the moment all federal entities fill their plans and actual via uploading documents or sheets with pre-defined format. This will be definitely enhanced in future phases of Adaa, which are already being planned. As I mentioned earlier I will hit more on the future phases of Adaa in future articles.
V. GPM in the UAE – Conclusion
This article was a very brief introduction about GPM in the UAE. Maybe it is intended to entice other government officials’ curiosity about the concept of GPM. Future articles will constitute a roadmap for government organizations who are considering GPM platforms. I will try to discuss how to investigate a GPM platform, and what other factors are to be taken into consideration, what other challenges that should be tackled by a GPM solution, and how to phase such an implementation. In all these articles I will be basing my discussions on previous experiences in this domain, given that the company I’m working for – Netways – is establishing itself as a leader in GPM implementations based on Microsoft platforms. This is demonstrated through some major implementations which I will also discuss in future articles.
Stay tuned for future articles 
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ahmad_Moussa
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Tags: balanced scorecard, business, corporate performance management, dashboards, government performance management, invest, performance management, uae government