The squalid world of professional management

Ungrateful wretches - the media have shown little interest in the Scottish Government's fabby new wheeze. As the press release puts it:

A new website that will enable the people of Scotland to see - at-a-glance - how Scotland is performing was launched today.
The Scotland Performs website will allow people to find out whether the Scottish nation is becoming wealthier, safer, healthier, greener and smarter.
Visitors to the Scotland Performs website will be presented with highly visual and easy to understand pages. They will have quick access to information about the quality of life in Scotland, and where thing are getting better and where things are getting worse.

Admittedly, Scotland Performs fails to mention local income tax, the Scottish Futures Trust, police numbers and class sizes in schools - those things which we understood to be the Government's flagships (if it is possible to sail with four flagships). But, hey, you can't have everything.

And - perhaps - the Scotland Performs approach is a little old-fashioned. After all, performance indicators are so 1990s.

See here for a more generalised attack on the culture of targets and performance indicators.