USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Managing performance in the forensic sciences: Expectations in light of limited budgets.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Max M. Houck

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

ISSN

1940-9036

Abstract

For forensic service providers worldwide, the demand for high-quality services greatly outpaces available resources to meet those requests. The gap between the demand for services and the resource-restricted supply of those services has implications for managing performance: the effectiveness and efficiency of forensic science. The effectiveness of forensic science is directly related to the quality of the scientific analysis and the timeliness with which that analysis is provided, while efficiency is associated with attempts to minimize costs without negatively impacting quality. An inevitable result of the demand and supply gap is a backlog that results in downstream effects on timeliness, service, and quality. One important strategy to respond to the demand-supply imbalance is continual process improvement. Collaborative benchmarking as a basis for process improvement is another approach. This paper discusses the disjunction between perceived and actual value for forensic services and the rationale for providers to evaluate, improve, and re-tool their processes toward continual improvement given limited resources.

Comments

Citation only. Full-text article is available through licensed access provided by the publisher. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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