Organizational Learning at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management

Federal agencies within the U.S. government have been increasingly involved in developing and using various “indicators” or “performance measures” as a means to track how well (or poorly) they are carrying out their assigned responsibilities. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the audit and evaluation arm of Congress, studied the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to examine its development and use of organizational performance measures (GAO 1990). The examination addressed performance measures and standards for quality, efficiency, timeliness, and customer satisfaction. GAO looked at how widely OPM was covered by performance measures and standards, and how performance measures were reported to various management levels. In the context of the GAO study, a standard is a norm of performance and a measure is the evaluation of actual performance.