Business Process Improvement

commentary

What Can We Learn from High-Performing Research Units?

Central characteristics of high-performing research units are the high quality of the people and the culture and values displayed within the department, which is often a result of leadership. It is also interesting to explore their differences, such as what makes a unit particularly good at having impact versus producing high-quality publications.

Catriona Manville, Sarah Parks

commentary

What Makes for High-Performing Research? The Right Mix of Staff and Appropriate Leadership

With many different higher education institutions in the UK covering a diverse range of disciplines, and delivering research in a variety of ways, it can be difficult to determine the qualities and characteristics of high-performing higher education institutions.

Catriona Manville, Saba Hinrichs

commentary

Scoring the Surgeon Scorecard

There is no tradeoff between recognizing the serious methodological problems in the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard, improving the Scorecard, and encouraging providers to release their own data. All three can and should be done simultaneously.

Mark W. Friedberg

commentary

When It Comes to Police-Community Relations, 'Expect What You Inspect'

As the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing report suggests, local governments should evaluate police on more than crime statistics, and police departments and officers should be held publicly accountable for meeting the community's expectations. Adding new dimensions of performance metrics would help.

Jessica Saunders, Laura Patton

commentary

A Competitive Landscape for Providing Services Is an Opportunity for Evidence-Building, but Who Will Benefit?

In a tight fiscal climate the UK government has been an innovator in ways to fund and deliver effective public services. New funding arrangements present opportunities for developing the evidence base for policy and practice, since they are associated with different types of service providers.

Jennifer Rubin, Emma Disley

commentary

The ACA's Opportunity to Improve Care for Substance Use Disorders

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will significantly increase coverage for the publicly funded treatment of substance use disorders. But in order to maximize the benefit to patients, families, and society, it's critical to invest in the development, validation, and use of performance measures.

Katherine E. Watkins

commentary

Surprise! Now What?

Who is best prepared for responding to surprise: a Navy SEAL, an NFL coach, or a Fortune 500 CEO? The answer is that all three professions have something to teach us: The NFL coach is an expert in pre-planning; the SEAL is great under pressure; and a good CEO has become an expert in responding to strategic threats.

Dave Baiocchi, D. Steven Fox

q&a

Surprise: Q&A with Dave Baiocchi and D. Steven Fox

Dave Baiocchi, RAND senior engineer and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and assistant policy analyst D. Steven Fox discuss their new study,

commentary

Metrics Mess Calls for an Umpire, Not a Purge

Bibliometricians, who have so far paid little attention to how their creations behave when released into the wild, should be monitoring how metrics are being applied and devising guidelines for best practice, writes Gemma Derrick.

Gemma Derrick

commentary

Advancing Social Outcomes: Private Investors Could Be Part of the Solution

Under a Social Impact Bond, private investors — rather than the government — provide up-front funding for programs that tackle such challenges as recidivism or homelessness. If these programs succeed, the government pays some of the savings back to the investors.

Jennifer Rubin, Emma Disley

commentary

Measuring Racial Profiling by Police

We all want to know whether racial profiling is taking place in communities, but we won't get those answers from incomplete data. Unless we take the time to ask the right questions and get the right answers, the truth about how much racial profiling is really going on will remain unknown.

K. Jack Riley, Greg Ridgeway