Wye, Christopher G.

(b. 1942, Washington, DC). Ph.D., M.A., Kent State University; B.A., Parsons College.

Wye is Founder and Director of the Center for Improving Government Performance at the National Academy of Public Administration, which offers technical assistance and consulting services regarding strategic planning, performance measurement, and performance-based management. As a recognized expert on performance-based management, Wye spent 20 years in the Senior Executive Service of the federal government, leading policy, evaluation, monitoring, and management functions. Since he joined the National Academy in 1991, he has established not only the Center for Improving Government Performance but the Performance Consortium, a group of more than 30 federal agencies that have joined under the academy's auspices to support effective implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act. The Performance Consortium provides a venue for peer-to-peer exchange of good practices through an annual program of workshops, discussion forums, conferences, and practice papers.

Wye's career-long interests have been policy analysis, program evaluation, and performance measurement. He has a concentrated focus on short-term, low-cost methodologies employed within existing time frames and budgets and designed specifically to facilitate utilization.

He has authored numerous articles and edited collections. Wye was cochair of an American Evaluation Association review of evaluation in the federal government in the mid-1980s and one of the principal architects of the American Evaluation Association's Guiding Principles for Evaluators. Wye served on the Board of Directors of the American Evaluation Association and is a University Fellow of Kent State University and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow.

He received the American Evaluation Association's Gunnar Myrdal Award for Government Service (1989), the Louis Pelzer Award from the Journal of American History for his 1972 article “The New Deal and the Negro Community: Toward a Broader Conceptualization,” and the Presidential Rank Award for Senior Executive Service to the U.S. Government.