Private sector managerial practices have spread into traditional public administration over the last three decades. In the 1980s, the New Public Management paradigm suggested a post-bureaucratic market-based approach (Barzelay & Armajani, 1992) that relied on two main principles: performance measurement and customer-citizen orientation. Since that time, several scholars and practitioners have tried to adapt managerial and marketing tools and to define suitable models for the public sector. Given its proximity to citizens, local government has been particularly affected by this paradigm evolution.
In particular, service performance measurement remains one of the most debated topics regarding public administration. Both internal and external indicators are available for this purpose. In the first case, objective measurements of service delivery (such as cost efficiency) are used to assess service performance. Meanwhile, external indicators are based on the evaluations of the customers (i.e., citizens) who rate their perceived service performance. As a result, by applying both internal and external indicators, public administrators can evaluate internal and external service quality and performance, that is, the overall quality of both traditional and e-government services. As in the private sector, the results of marketing research are used to adapt offerings to customers’ needs. Collected data also serve as input for decision making in the public sector. Several indicators have been suggested and tested by scholars for this purpose.
Nonetheless, recent studies show that several local public administrators remain skeptical about external data’s usefulness and reliability, whereas internal indicators are more easily accepted and require less effort to be applied. Not surprisingly, some surveys report that only a minority of local governments have adopted external indicators so far.
Thus, this chapter addresses the need to overcome this skepticism by demonstrating the fundamental role and relevance of adopting external indicators to develop an efficient local government management. These theoretical arguments are supported by the results of a survey conducted within Italian local government. Table 1 summarizes the structure of the chapter, providing a model for readers to follow.