But in government, there are no universally accepted standards for assessing value, write Martin Cole and Greg Parston, authors of Unlocking Public Value: a New Model for Achieving High Performance in Public Service Organizations.

In the book, Cole, group chief executive of Accenture LLP’s government operating group, and Parston, director of the Accenture Institute for Public Service Value, set about to change that by advancing Accenture’s Public Service Value Model, a framework for measuring the performance of public programs.

But the book is more than a sales pitch for Accenture’s metrics tool. It is a meticulous investigation of outcomes and their importance to measuring performance in the public sector.

“One central argument in this book is that public managers who clearly and consistently articulate the intended outcomes of their organizations and programs and then measure their progress in achieving those outcomes will go a long way toward making their organization accountable in the eyes of the public and improving their performance over time,” Cole and Parston say in the preface.

The authors distinguish between “outcomes” and “outputs,” two terms that tend to be confused. Outputs are products, goods or services. Outcomes are the impacts, benefits or consequences for the public that those goods and services are designed to produce.

To be sure, outcomes are much harder to achieve than outputs, and many public-service organizations tend to measure outputs rather than outcomes. The authors devote an entire chapter to the difficulties of measuring public sector outcomes.

Another chapter, called “Zeroing in on Outcomes,” offers an absorbing historical analysis of efforts to measure outcomes in government. Despite the legislative mandate created 13 years ago by the Government Performance and Results Act and other initiatives, outcome measurement “is still not a mature practice in U.S. government departments and agencies,” Cole and Parston assert.

The authors quote Mark Catlett, former chief financial officer of the Veterans Affairs Department, who declares that government is “turning this battleship around,” but not fast enough.

The solution, the authors say, lies in techniques such as the Public Service Value Model, which adapts the principles of commercial shareholder value analysis to a public service context.