Deborah Kerr
Lecturer
Deborah L. Kerr, Ph.D. consults on the creation of strategic plans and performance management and measurement systems and provides coaching, training, and professional development services to medium and large organizations in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. She also serves on the graduate faculty at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
Deborah was most recently Senior Vice-President at the American Heart Association's Texas Affiliate, 2005-2007. As a member of the Heart Association's executive team, she led the implementation of human capital systems and balanced scorecards.
Prior to joining the Heart Association, Deborah was on the executive team of the Texas State Auditor's Office for 14 years. With this team she led the implementation of one of the first public sector balanced scorecard management systems in the country. The Office's rollout of the Scorecard was recognized as one of the four most successful implementations in the country by the Society for Human Resource Management. The project also received a Best Practices award from the Association of Government Accountants and the Excellence in Performance Management Award from the American Society for Industrial Security Foundation. In September 2004 the Office was elected to the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame, acknowledging its performance management system as one of the world's best.
Deborah's article on implementing the scorecard in the public sector was published in the fall 2001 issue of Perform. Several states, counties, and cities, including the Civil Service College in Singapore have used this case study and it has been one of the magazine's most requested reprints. The article is published in Italian at www.balancedscorecardreview.it
In June 2003 she published "Accountability by Numbers," an article about building measurement systems and using critical management data in the Journal of Accountancy. In November 2003 this article was reprinted in The Accounting World by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. Both Paul Niven's 2002 book Balanced Scorecard Step by Step and Mohan Nair's 2004 book Essentials of the Balanced Scorecard write about Deborah's work and feature this scorecard implementation as a best practice model.
Deborah's work in the private and public sectors has always focused on strategic management and managing results through performance measurement. In its 1993 review of the 50 states' management practices, Financial World Magazine cited her design of public sector employee performance appraisal systems as one of four outstanding public sector management initiatives. She is frequently asked to speak on management strategy and management of human performance at national, regional, and state conferences.
Deborah served on the National Advisory Panel for Human Resource Performance Measurement at the Maxwell School of Government, Syracuse University, developing public sector performance measures for the "Grading Government" series published in Governing magazine. She was an Inaugural Lecturer in the "Public Management from the Perspectives of Leading Professionals" series at the opening of the George Bush School at Texas A&M University.
In 2002, she co-authored a chapter on consulting to government, for the textbook In Action: Building a Successful Consulting Practice published by ASTD. The chapter describes the development of a public sector, fee-based consulting practice to work with agencies, which Deborah managed. In 2003 Harvard's Institute for Government Innovation named this operation one of the top 100 innovations in American government. In 2004 this approach also won the Excellence in Accountability Award from the National State Auditor's Association.
Deborah holds degrees from Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame), Columbia University, and The University of Texas at Austin. At the Bush School, she teaches public policy formation and performance management and measurement; she also periodically supervises capstone projects. She has also served as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Business, Texas State University.
