Organizational Impact of Enhancing a BI-Supported Performance Measurement System on the Israeli Police

Performance Measurement Systems (PMS) have long captured the attention of organizational behavior and information systems (IS) research. Today, PMS are broadly adopted across all industries and business domains, and their implementation is often supported by Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. The implementation PMS is driven by the notion that consistent and well-organized measurement, reflecting past behavior and current state of different organizational units, can server as an important tool for supporting decision-support and driving continuous performance improvement. PMS may back these goals by providing solutions for gathering, analyzing, and distributing relevant information.  Much of the PMS research so far is non-empirical, and not supported by rigorous evidence. Further, PMS studies mostly focus on for-profit businesses, but less on organizations that are not necessarily driven by profit goals, such as governmental agencies or community-based groups.

This study explores the impact of a PMS in a real-world setting, within a governmental agency – the Israeli Police Forces. The scope of the research is examining the transition between two PMS: the “MENAHEL” was in use between 2006 and 2010, while the “MIFNE” replaced it in 2010. Both PMS were implemented with advanced Business Intelligence (BI) technologies and embedded a number of performance metrics that reflect the police strategy and activities. Beyond enhancement of BI technologies, a key difference between the systems was the re-design of the metrics structure. While the "MENAHEL" offered a large number of metrics (over 150), some with a very low relative weight, the "MIFNA" offered a reduced and more focused set that was developed based on the knowledge and insight that were gained during the operation of the "MENAHEL".

The study is based on analysis of performance-measurement data that was received from the Israeli police. The time-period covered, 2006-2013, reflects the usage both PMS and can possibly highlighter the extent of their adoption and impact. The dataset covers 60 police stations and measures of activities such as the number of cases opened, arrests and indictments per station. Those measures are relevant for 13 crime categories, which are mutual to all police stations in the study. The Israeli police had also provided details annual numbers of human resource and budget allocations for the stations that were covered.

A question that motivates this study is whether or not the transition from the older "MENAHEL" PMS to a newer "MIFNE" has promoted the desired improvement in police-units performance. A preliminary analysis shows improvement in most metrics after the switch to the new system; however, with some period of instability during the transition. The study is still progressing, and aims at looking further into the data provided. The goal is to explore in-depth factors that may help understanding the PMS impact, such as police-unit characteristics, human resource assignment and budget allocation.