Over the last decade, and more recently with the economic roller coaster we've been on, organizations are becoming more self-sufficient. We're seeing this evidence via corporate downsizing, professional development, and a structure of learning taking place in companies worldwide.
Along with self-sufficiency in business strategy planning, marketing, manufacturing processes, and retail production and distribution should bring the evaluation of these aforementioned tasks. The development of an organization's capacity to plan, conduct, and use evaluation is crucial to not only the success of individual programs, processes, and tasks, but also the overall success of the organization as a whole. This applies to all disciplines (e.g., non-profits, NGOs, for-profits, education, government, military).
Although many definitions of evaluation capacity building (ECB) now circulate the globe, I believe the simplest working definition can be found in the writing of Stockdill, Baizerman, and Compton (2002), where they define ECB as, "the intentional work to continuously create and sustain overall organizational processes that make quality evaluation and its uses routine" (p. 14). Here evaluation becomes the norm rather than the exception. Evaluations themselves and the corresponding structure become transparent within the organization. All hierarchical levels in the organization - from the clerical staff to the team leaders to the CEO - understand and capitalize on the importance of evaluation and how it affects business processes and the accompanying bottom line. Creating evaluation capacity with any type of organization involves not only evaluators, but also the organization itself. Both parties need to take a proactive mindset to create the organizational structure needed to support evaluation capacity.
As an organizational leader, think of evaluation capacity building as creating evaluation self-sufficiency within your organization. You not only need to see the importance of
evaluation in the short and long term, but also develop the skills to conduct evaluations and use the results of such to further your business vision.
A good place to start is to think about the topics listed in A Checklist for Building Organizational Capacity (Volkov and King, 2007) made available through The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University. Discuss these principles with your colleagues and how you can implement them in your daily practice. There are many resources available to assist you, such as evaluation consultants, professional development opportunities, etc.
The first step is to understand how becoming self-sufficient in evaluation can improve your organizational mission, vision statements, goals, and ultimately the bottom line. Then take additional steps to see that goal become a reality.
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