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Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by briandear on Friday August 11, 2017 @11:04AM (#14990347)
Agreed. This is why we need zero-based budgeting. Force organizations to justify every dollar every year rather than just using previous years as the starting point.
Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by dclowd9901 on Friday August 11, 2017 @11:08AM (#14990410)
That doesn't work either: you get situations like the TSA artificially backing up airport security lines to "necessitate" budget increases.

They should incentivize efficiency. In government, it would be citizen impact per employee. If you have more, you make more money, if you have less, you make less.

Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by chrisallenlane on Friday August 11, 2017 @12:20PM (#14991385)
> citizen impact per employee.

Do you think it would actually possible to quantify this in a way that:

1. Accurately represented "reality"?

2. Couldn't/wouldn't be gamed?

Seems challenging to me.

Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by dclowd9901 on Friday August 11, 2017 @04:20PM (#14993786)
I think you can probably boil impact down to several key metrics:

1) How many people are affected by the work of this agency

2) How quickly are peoples' needs handled on average

3) How pleased are people with the work of this agency

I think you could trivially measure each of those.

Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by jacalata on Saturday August 12, 2017 @02:31AM (#14996728)
How pleased people are this year, or in ten years time? There are lots of ways to make users happy in the short term at the expense of long term benefits.
Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by jooke on Saturday August 12, 2017 @07:30AM (#14997488)
If the police stopped arresting people then criminals would be much more pleased with their work
Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by zentiggr on Friday August 11, 2017 @02:25PM (#14992785)
I've never seen any metric that can't be gamed somehow.

Choosing metrics to represent practical value, rather than let them be decided by profit-seekers, that's the real trick.

Re:MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus... by josephorjoe on Friday August 11, 2017 @12:08PM (#14991213)
Meh, there are times/places when that is a good idea.

But if you make it annual standard operating procedure, then you are paying people to create spreadsheets and documents rather than, say, do something useful.

And the money will funnel to the people who are awesome at creating spreadsheets and documents rather than the people who are good at doing useful stuff.

Effective oversight requires understanding the domain and being motivated to continually improve things.