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While it has become ubiquitous in the public sector over the past 25 years, strategic planning will need to play a more critical role in 2020 than it does at present if public managers are to anticipate and manage change adroitly and effectively address new issues that are likely to emerge with increasing rapidity. This article argues that making strategy more meaningful in the future will require transitioning from strategic planning to the broader process of strategic management, which involves managing an agency's overall strategic agenda on an ongoing rather than an episodic basis, as well as ensuring that strategies are implemented effectively. Complementing this move to more holistic strategic management, we need to shift the emphasis of the performance movement from a principal concern with measurement to the more encompassing process of performance management over the coming decade in order to focus more proactively on achieving strategic goals and objectives. Finally, agencies will need to link their strategic management and ongoing performance management processes more closely in a reciprocating relationship in which strategizing is aimed largely at defining and strengthening overall performance while performance monitoring helps to inform strategy along the way.
Guest editors' note: In 1942, the University of Chicago Press published a book edited by Leonard D. White titled The Future of Government in the United States. Each chapter in the book presents predictions concerning the future of U.S. public administration. In this article, Theodore H. Poister examines John Vieg's predictions on the future of government planning published in that book, comments on whether Vieg's predictions were correct not, and then looks to the future to examine public administration in 2020.

State departments of transportation are investing suabstantial time and effort in developing performance measurement systems to help manage more effectively in a period of unprecedented change. Based on information obtained from a mail survey, review of documents, and follow-up telephone interviews, this article examines conventional and leading-edge approaches to performance measurement in these large public works agencies, which have often been characterized as being "data rich/information poor." Compared with the traditional operations-oriented management information systems, the new generation of performance measures emerging in departments of transportation tend to be more outcome-oriented and more strategically focused, with much greater emphasis on quality and customer service.

This article reviews the underlying logic and usefulness of true performance monitoring, as distinguished from the more customary administrative monitoring, and explores the potential contribution of performance monitoring to improved program evaluation in terms of (1) providing an accumulating data base which may serve many different research designs and (2) supporting the evaluation process in general. The article concludes that increased emphasis on performance monitoring will lead to the development of more cost-effective evaluation programs in terms of policy relevance and utilization.