When CitiStat, an innovative data-driven management tool was first introduced in New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, some department heads in those cities were not happy. Confronted with hard data and metrics about their department’s performance, managers were grilled as to why complaints about missed trash pick-ups were on the rise or what plans a precinct commander had to deal with a statistically significant increase in street crime. A few said it felt like the “Spanish Inquisition”. While we would never support thumb screws or the rack, sometimes being called to account is the only way to shake up entrenched interests and force fundamental changes in the way a city does business.
CitiStat, at its core, relies upon a three-pronged approach to achieve breakthrough results: data, geographic mapping, and regular meetings between managers and top executives. Data is collected from city-wide call centers which handle nearly every interaction between citizen and their government. That enables municipalities to collect information about services citizens are requesting and where those requests are coming from. The city can quickly identify, for example, when trash pick-ups are being missed or when there is a rapid increase in graffiti complaints coming from a particular location.
This information, as well as additional data collected such as emergency calls and crime reports, is then compiled by a dedicated team of analysts – the CitiStat team – and reported out in easy-to-digest reports that pinpoint areas that need attention. Some of these reports can be critically important – such when there is a spike in street crime or gang activity in a neighborhood – as it provides the information management needs to know so as to quickly shift resources and better manage priorities. In other instances, the reports can uncover hidden problems such as a correlation between graffiti tagging and a cut back in afternoon library hours.
After collecting and compiling the data, CitiStat’s most powerful contribution to improving municipal services comes through regular meetings in which the CitiStat team, the Mayor, and management meet together to review that week’s information. That kind of accountability and transparency can be hard on employees and difficult to implement. In 2001 Governing Magazine wrote that because of CitiStat “Baltimore’s bureaucracy is being systematically turned on its head” and that it was meeting fierce resistance in a city in which “if you ask why things are done a certain way, the likely answer is because they’ve always been done that way.”
Now, seven years after first being rolled out and surviving changing administrations, in Baltimore CitiStat has become embedded deep within that city’s municipal culture and has a proven track record of success. According to a report by the think-tank Center for American Progress, in its first year CitiStat helped the City of Baltimore save $13.2 million – $6 million in overtime pay alone. In departments other than the Police Department, by 2002 overtime fell by 40% and absenteeism dropped by as much as 50%.
Importantly for cash-strapped municipalities in San Diego County, CitiStat is not that costly to implement. In the case of Baltimore, they found an off-the-shelf software solution and initially used data that city departments were already collecting. According to the Center for American Progress, the CitiStat department has never had more than 8 analysts working on it. By way of comparison, the City of San Diego is budgeting to spend $2.3 million dollars on its Customer Service Department and staffs that department with 23 employees.
Data-driven decision making in the public sphere is not a wonder cure. Dangers exist. Recalcitrant bureaucracies can respond by providing decision makers with “data dumps”, overwhelming them with facts and figures that do not tell any sort of coherent story or provide an opportunity for management to pinpoint problems. They can also provide simply the “good news”, indicating for example, the percentage of people who visited a library had a great time rather than surveying the entire population to see how they feel about services and service levels. Both those dangers are the reason to create a CitiStat team – staffed by experts in how to analyze, interpret, and present quantitative data.
In addition, upper management has to be strongly committed to the system – willing to highlight deficiencies as a way to get improvements to the system as opposed to painting only rosy pictures that might lead to short-term electoral advantage. CitiStat, if used correctly, will consistently point out ways for a city to improve, suggesting that the status quo can and should be improved upon. Sometimes, for short-sighted politicians who want to tell voters that everything is OK and nothing more needs to be done, that can be uncomfortable.
The City of Baltimore’s CitiStat web site indicates that over the past year hundreds of officials for cities in the United States and Europe have visited to see what is going on and how data-driven government can create a more efficient and effective government in their city. Unfortunately no delegation from a city in San Diego County has made that trip. It is past time that they did.
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