Multi-measure performance assessment of the divisions of the Wyoming Highway Patrol

Abstract

With many lives lost every year in traffic related crashes, traffic safety is a big concern all around the world. One way to advance traffic safety practices is to improve the overall organizational performance of agencies responsible for enforcing traffic safety. Internal benchmarking would be the first step to accomplish that goal, in order to compare the units of an organization, identify the best performing ones, and learn from their best practices so that other units within the organization can take advantage and improve their performance as well. Wyoming Highway Patrol (WHP) is a data-driven organization which uses multiple measures to assess its performance. These measures can be used by WHP to perform comparisons between its 17 divisions. However, this process involves the utilization of a single performance measure at a time and may result in difficulties in identifying the overall performance. Therefore, there is a need to develop a performance assessment framework that can identify the overall performance of these divisions in the presence of multiple measures. This research presents a performance assessment system developed for WHP using Data Envelopment Analysis. This system can incorporate multiple measures, enabling WHP to identify its best-performing divisions to be able to use those as benchmarks.