Introduction

This new model of social administration has as its central mission the production of desired client outcomes. It is client outcomes which become the “bottom-line” of human service organizations much like profit is for the business sector. The social administrator's job is to steer the program towards increasingly effective services through program design and the management of people, resources, and information. This simply cannot happen unless the organization systematically defines and measures client outcomes. Not doing so is like the business which does not regularly monitor profit and market share. As Rapp and Poertner state in the preceding article in this volume:

… not to monitor client outcomes systematically and use that data to improve operations is tantamount to managerial irresponsibility, incompetence, and unethical conduct.