As Latour (1996) notes, proponents at the
beginning of a project are neither very convinced
nor very convincing, often suggesting ideas to try
to make projects more concrete. In addition to
demonstrating to public servants that the Office
possessed expertise to assess performance, auditors also had to develop this expertise – or at least become confident that they had. Initial attempts
to develop and implement performance measurement in Alberta were largely a trial and error process. Assessing performance was seen as presenting significant challenges, in terms of the direct assessments of performance and the standards that would be used to measure and audit performance. In particular, auditors were not clear about how performance should be measured in departments whose activities are ‘‘soft and advisory’’ (e.g., inter-governmental affairs); whether measures of outputs could be linked to dollars; and the extent to which specific measures would be relevant to users.