Each of the programme actors have their own responsibilities, their own areas of decision-making and therefore their own information needs. As a result, all indicators are not useful at all levels. On the contrary, it is generally accepted that each actor requires an operating report with a small number of indicators, selected as the most relevant in relation to the nature of the decisions that have to be made. It has been shown that in a situation of decision-making, a person cannot take into account more than about ten indicators at once [1]. When there are too many indicators the decision-makers are swamped with an excess of information.
The heterogeneity of programmes
The experience of the Structural Funds has shown that it is difficult to choose indicators that are absolutely necessary for the monitoring and evaluation of a programme. Because the programmes are multi-sectoral and multi-objective, there is a tendency to want to measure everything and to design systems of indicators that are so heavy that it is impossible to make them work.
In practice, it is impossible to produce and regularly use such a large amount of information. For example, the initial proposal for a Structural Fund Programme in Burgundy (France) consisted of over 200 indicators. In the end, only about fifty of them were quantified.
In several European regions, evaluations have shown that a few dozen indicators are enough to meet the information needs of the authorities running the programme (as in Northern Ireland, see Box The recommendation of an evaluation: reduce the number of indicators from 330 to 52 ). This does not mean, however, that additional indicators may not be required to meet the operators' information needs.
One approach for limiting the size of the systems of indicators, without loosing relevant information, is to identify generic indicators, or to group together indicators by category of beneficiary.
Suggestions for limiting the size of systems of indicators
Suggestions for limiting the size of systems of indicators are typically based on the use of generic indicators or on the grouping of indicators by category of beneficiary. A lighter system limits the collection and circulation of information to the most essential elements at the programme level. On the other hand, this means that the progress and results of each action will not be monitored in a detailed and centralised manner. It also means that the system focuses less on the decisions to be made by the operators and more on those to be made by the authorities managing the programme.
Finding generic impact indicators
Impact indicators are indispensable in evaluation but they are difficult to design and quantify. Apart from the number of jobs created, it is particularly rare to find generic impact indicators in programming documents (some examples are given in Box Examples of generic impact indicators ).