Community water systems face pressure to improve performance
because of increasing public scrutiny, decreasing financial
health, and increasing infrastructure rehabilitation/replacement
costs. This pressure requires community water systems to improve
accountability to stakeholders relative to all aspects of their performance.
However, the current performance assessment and evaluation
(PAE) approach of community water systems is highly individualized
by service, and it provides little opportunity for benchmark
comparisons across the community water system (CWS) sector.
Existing PAE frameworks focus on the continuous improvement of
core processes internal to a CWS without providing a standard for
consistent comparison across services within a geographical region.
The research presented in this article hypothesizes that an effective
solution to this problem would be to: (1) facilitate public awareness
by developing a standard efficiency metric (SEM) parameter for
a standardized PAE that would enable stakeholders to compare the
performance of their CWS to the regional benchmarks; (2) enhance
financial health characteristics by enabling regional management to
base resource allocation decisions on uniform performance information
about the services in the regional water system; and (3) increase
service operating efficiency over the current practice.
The SEM parameter described in this article is capable of
providing assessment information to the individual community
water system provider in order to improve performance. The SEM
parameter also enables the comparison and benchmarking of
CWSs operating as a regional water system through the standardized
PAE framework. As accountability in the CWS sector
improves through the use of the SEM parameter, the expected
result will be more effective resource allocation decisions across
a collection of CWSs operating as a regional system. Includes 28 references, 2 tables, 4 figures.
| Edition : | Vol. 97 - No. 10 |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 270 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 11 |
| Published : | 10/01/2005 |
