Baltimore CitiStat
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This was a draft case study compiled from online sources. Due to the lack of response by CitiStat staff, it was not xiaoaojianghucompleted.
CONTACT: Elliot H. Schlanger, CIO, Baltimore
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Email: xxxxx.xxxxxx@xyz.gov
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Baltimore CitiStat: accountability by statistics
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Background Information
Title: Baltimore CitiStat
Location: Baltimore, MD, US
Primary Sponsor: Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's office
Organisation: City of Baltimore, MD
Budget: US$285,000 in FY2001 included all start-up (20,000 in hardware alone) and operating costs: Project paid for itself for forseeable future out of first year savings of US$13M [1]
Project Start Date: 29/06/2000
Project End Date: 北京印刷ongoing
Executive Summary
CitiStat meetings are held every other week led by first Deputy Mayor Michael Enright, who asks questions repeatedly until they are answered. Days before each meeting, each bureau or agency is required to submit data to the CitiStat team covering the last two weeks statistics on: solid waste, dirty alleys, crime rates, etc. It is tested by field investigations, who pull cases at random and formulate questions about 手提袋印刷it that become the basis of the Deputy Mayor's questioning. [2]
Project Rationale and Objectives
The project was conceived as an extension of NYC CompStat, which the 北京翻译公司 's Jack Maple had applied to its own operations, utilizing computer pin mapping and weekly accountability sessions. Maple "sold" O'Malley on using this same process not only for crime, but for every City agency from Public Works to Health, so managers can be held accountable, persistent problems identified, and results measured on a weekly basis, not quarterly nor annually. 翻译公司
The project was aimed at Baltimore City managers who required tools to hold themselves to account, and each other to account, for the quality of city services - both to the citizens, and to each other's departments. 办证The first Deputy Mayor is the main facilitator - with the full backing of the Mayor who now rarely needs to attend meetings to signal his strong support of the questioning city managers endure.
In these respects it was a fairly typical but deep exercise in quality management in government. The project's original explicit objectives or "tenets" were:
- accurate and timely intelligence
- effective tactics and 办证strategies
- rapid deployment of resources
- relentless follow-up and assessment
"CitiStat participants are required to report financial and operational performance data on a bi-weekly basis." This came to be extended to many new city services, as it became obvious that CitiStat and CSR also served as:
- platform for management 北京办证of new city programs like 311
All are available to the public via the City's website. A final objective of the project, then, is full citizen transparency of daily operations, so that 北京办证they are assured their tax money is well spent.
This permits citizens to become increasingly involved in public decisions, to achieve this sixth objective:
- transparency to citizens
- greater public participation in policy-making
- greater effectiveness in policy-making through broader public input
- reduced debates on public policy issues through more thorough public consultation
- more confidence in municipal government
- reduced government 北京办证scandals through greater transparency
- reduced need for expensive public inquiries
The project also makes regular annual municipal performance audits to US GAO standards easier, since robust timely statistics are already available.
What was delivered?
The project was delivered in four phases:
continuous audit / EIS
The mayor’s original goal was to make Baltimore a "safer and cleaner" city with a continuous municipal performance audit: city statistics and accountability sessions led by city politicians.
"Our mayor is concerned about how well we perform after we hang up the phone and the service request is initiated," said Elliot H. Schlanger, the city’s chief information officer. "And if we capture every service request in the city the same way and start to track them, this tool can be a very significant executive information system for monitoring performance through all of the agencies." [http://bjbzgs.blog.ccidnet.com/ 北京办证from coverage of a 2002 seminar on the project]
CSR
Once this was in place, a need to resolve thousands of citizen service requests daily, Baltimore linked it to Motorola's enterprise-wide customer service request system to provide information to its citizens, track requests for services and assign work crews to resolve non-emergency service requests.
311
This served as a basis for the City's later 311 service (see more extensive coverage of that below).
extensions: youth, housing, public works...
The scope of the project expands constantly to include all regular information gathered in the city that is subject to decision making based on statistics. It includes at present "all of the City of Baltimore's major operating departments...Department of Public Works' Bureaus of General Services, Solid Waste, Transportation, and Water and Wastewater, the Fire and Health Departments, as well as the Departments of Housing and Community Development and Recreation and Parks... oversight of the Police Department's administrative functions" and other "stat" processes... for a wide range of intergovernmental issues including the delivery of youth services (KidStat), the coordination of public housing, public safety, and public works initiatives (Eastern District Stat), and the planning of economic development and capital spending efforts (TechStat, Westside Stat, and CIPStat)." [3]
Communication Activity
Few projects have been as successful at communication as CitiStat. Every aspect of the project seems to be oriented to improving communication and 翻译公司between citizens and city staff delivering the services, between different departments of the city, between city and subcontractors, and between the city politicians and all of these.
Beyond that it has been markedly successful at spreading its approach to other places - notably to Iraq - along with city work force and youth development initiatives, and cities closer to home like Austin,画册印刷 Boston and San Francisco. It has even run seminars on the approach it takes to city problems. These, and consulting on deployment of the system in other cities, increase revenue, but, they might be at the expense of actually enhancing the whole system - which seems very possible - see 手提袋印刷Limitations below.
Education and awareness seems very high among
- Citizens, thanks to the real time web reporting
- Councillors, thanks to high visibility of CitiStat
- Other cities, thanks to a dedicated outreach effort
Successes
huge financial payoff
In its first year (FY01) 不干胶印刷it saved enough to pay for itself for the forseeable future, via major savings:
- reduce operational costs: US$1.75M in FY2001, US$4.2M in FY2002
- control and reduce overtime costs: US$5.8M in FY2001, US$10.8M in FY2002
- reduce absenteeism and accident time utilization: US$1.2M in FY2001, US$1.7M in FY2002
and minor savings in
- increase revenue?: US$3.65M in FY2001, US$4.4M in FY2002
- end initiatives inconsistent with Mayoral priorities: US$1M in FY2001
- instituted new operational practices to improve quality and effectiveness of city services: US$8.7M in FY2002
any one of which categories pays for the whole project.[4]
fully self-funded
Presumably remaining北京印刷helps keep the project independent of city politics: this may be an additional emergent objective of the project, for it to justify itself on this basis alone. The project is also spreading to other cities such as Austin, TX, US - which expects a "US$1M price tag" [5] that presumably includes some royalties to the City of Baltimore for its innovation, and other intangible objectives such as helping form government consortia to standardize the approach, perhaps making software integration and data formats available via Share Alike or similar licensing. It is not clear if the city anticipated such revenue when it started.
risks reduced
There were also benefits that were not estimated, but, if properly accounted for, could easily be in future:
- processed incoming calls four times faster
- reduced city's potential liability costs through proactive risk assessment and management (most benefits here are high-regrets low-probability situations)
- improved Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, e.g. avoid state and federal liability from collateral damage to industries, e.g. tourism, in a crisis that is better managed due to prior operational accountability
- improved Civil Defense and Critical Infrastructure protection due to better monitoring of infrastructure
- increase public accountability and availability of operational performance data画册印刷
- increase inter- and intra-governmental coordination
(These risk-reducing benefits are not included among the benefits to citizens, authority and councillors:)
Benefits to Citizens
instant web access
The project makes the quantitative workings of local government easily and instantly visible in the way it should: on the web. "CitiStat participants are required to report financial and operational performance data on a bi-weekly basis" which is then visible to the public via the City's website
big tax savings
The most tangible benefit to citizens is tax savings. The project paid for itself 45 times over in its very first year. According to Mayor O'Malley himself in a talk at Harvard, "in our first year we saved $13.6M... we had a chronic absentee problem, which led to a chronic overtime problem. We saved $6M the first year just getting people back to work and reducing overtime. We've saved $44 million over the past three years mostly by reducing overtime and absenteeism, finding efficiencies and developing new revenue streams." [6]
city model more accessible
CitiStat helps citizens see their City in operation, and thus become actively involved in it. In effect, Baltimore becomes more accessible, perhaps appearing even to those who grew up with video games as akin to SimCity, something which is fun to understand and manage and optimize, rather than as boring old gov't.
reduce neglect
This is a qualitative benefit it is hard to get any other way than with colourful graphics and maps of places where people live. 办证 It also becomes obvious if one neighourhood is neglected or has special problems, which helps citizens help themselves much more readily.
enable distributed 311
To citizens the most tangible and easily understood benefit however is the easy deployment of a 311 service as a follow on to CitiStat. In addition to benefits of transparency and easy access to all city service information, which is typical for a 311 service, the distributed CSR system and statistics regimen already deployed for CitiStat makes it possible to manage more distributed 311 services running from home offices or smaller satellite offices. When fully deployed this:
- creates jobs for people who were under-employed,
- opens more job opportunities for people with disabilities
- reduced payments to people on disability support programs
- more personal pride for people in the disabled community through job satisfaction
- better jobs for students who can 办证do only part-time work
- better jobs for stay-at-home moms who can do only part-time work
- better jobs for seniors who are hard to employ full time
- opens more job opportunities for people with disabilities
- reduces requirements for office space with more home work sites
- reduces staff commuting, leading to
- reduced road traffic
- reduced road maintenance costs
- reduced greenhouse gas emissions and tradeable carbon credit
- built-in emergency use site in even of main-office shutdowns.
- eliminate costs for maintaining emergency sites.
- public health
- reduced smog due to fewer commutes and fewer City Hall visits
- reduced health costs for respiratory illnesses
- reduced cost of 311 service results in increasing service coverage eg. more languages
- increase in 311 service for minor languages results in better inclusion of immigrants, reducing social exclusion and building social capital and trust.
Baltimore strongly recommends 北京办证deploying CitiStat and a CSR system before any 311 system, so that data has a place to go, and accountability sessions can take into account the 311 feedback as an ordinary extension of the ordinary operating statistics.
Note: Baltimore has not fully distributed its 311 service, but has stated that it's possible to do so.
Benefits to Authority
In the first year, a million dollars' worth of projects incompatible with the Mayor's strategic objectives?were terminated. In the second, over eight million dollars worth of savings were achieved with new programs that were launched primarily on the basis of CitiStat data which showed the need for them. The Mayor's office can claim direct credit for these, and is obviously setting the direction of the city's administration, in control of expenses and staff, and gaining good publicity for Baltimore.
The project fulfils government requirements and legal mandates by achieving a vast range of savings and more effectively used powers and resources, for instance:
- more efficient deployment of public works
- reduced inspection costs through broader public input
- better solid waste pickup
- faster cleanup of illegal dumpsites through better monitoring
- more effective law enforcement
- better crime prediction and management
- better targetting of crime prevention programs
- better targetting of youth recreation programs to meet the needs of youth at risk
- reduced use of paid overtime
- better management of staff sick-leave
There is no doubt that the project raised the profile of the authority both to citizens and to other cities all over the world. This is probably Mayor O'Malley's main visible achievement.
Financial benefits predicted were probably far less than actually achieved, so, authority also benefits from intelligent risk-taking. However, those who follow may be on the hook to北京办证 squeeze out even more! The bar has been set high.
Benefits to Councillors
Councillors can get closer to detailed policy decisions simply by attending the regular CitiStat sessions. The Deputy Mayor's techniques of questioning and holding the staff to account are likely emulated by Councillors to their political benefit, as they are all effectively in competition to replace the DM.
Councillors can keep track of progress on their own initiatives via the statistics, and can hold the executive to account the same way the executive holds staff to account: with reference to the objectively gathered and reviewed statistics. What's good for the staff is good for the boss.
Councillors are more informed of the concerns of the population in their ward and events in the community, largely due to the CSR system and deployment of 311 - which Baltimore recommends should only come AFTER there is a fully deployed statistics gathering and review session system. Else, the data has nowhere to go, and will not be easy for Councillors to access and exploit.
Limitations
The scope of the project could have been broader by planning and measuring other potential benefits, e.g.
- other risk reduction
- first responders more able to respond properly with more accurate information about prior situations, thus less danger
- tracking patterns in Public Health more easily
- potential for telework due to city instrumentation and accessibility of data online:
- minimizing exposure of key staff in medical emergency
- greenhouse gas credits generated by telework that replaces commuting
The project is primarily focused on back-office functions. Despite its central position in the City's signal infrastructure, it seems not to have focused on other back-office questions like boot image control, mobile user interfaces, and so on. The project has proven that transparency and standards work - it should extend that approach as far as possible. A good first start was made by integrating customer service requests (which can also handle network operations centre functions), but more could be done to deploy the information beyond accountability sessions. There is clearly unexplored potential for mobility of the information in some situations:
More telework should be possible thanks to the increased transparency and digital availability of data seems not to be accounted as a benefit. For instance distributed 311 service seems very possible given the prior existence of the CSR system and sophisticated City IT management, and commitment to accurate data for citizens. Why not update it weekly instead of bi-weekly and let City staff spend a day a week working at home with the information? This could bring in more qualified City staff who don't like five-day commutes.
If all first responders, for instance, were able to quickly determine what other incidents had gone on in the area they were called to in the most recent past, it might reduce their exposure to risk or their comfort in the situation.
While budget, time and public enthusiasm are all high, and few obstacles were encountered, the project seems to have spent more time publicizing its success and spreading itself around than estimating costs "not estimated" in the initial two years.
One way to help quantify these additional benefits would be if the state of Maryland could adopt a similar system and apply performance audits suitable to its own obligations, as some of CitiStat's benefits appear to accrue mostly at state level.
- reduced crime through improved municipal social services & youth recreation
- reduced prison population and reduced corrections costs
- reduced benefits payouts if 311 is implemented in a distributed fashion on top of a CitiStat/CSR platform
Some of these might be better defined at the federal level, especially those related to emergency and first responder issues (those areas covered by US FEMA).
Evaluation
The quantitative measures that were used to assess the project were fairly conventional:
- reduced labour costs
- faster throughput - especially for phone calls
- other reduced operations costs
- terminated projects
The qualitative measures were北京办证 risk management and transparency focused. The general assumption is that transparency and accountability reduces risk and makes citizens more likely to percieve their city as well run.
Because the project was so innovative, ROI was really the only benchmark to measure success against. In these terms, its 45-to-1 return was outstanding.
A conventional US GAO municipal performance audit would provide a clearer evaluation picture. Reviewing this was out of the scope of this study.
Lessons learnt
With so few obstacles encountered in this project, it is hard to explain how these might be avoided. Maybe the main obstacle would be lack of belief that there is such a great savings to be had in accountability alone.
That seems easily dealt with given the well-publicized statistics and review by Kennedy School of Government and other highly credible sources of e-government best practice.
Usability of the products of the project might be increased by better integration with spreadsheets or local databases, and even wikis to attach citizen comments or notes.
When doing the project in a European or Canadian or Massachusetts or California city, or anywhere else subject to Kyoto Protocol, it would be wise to integrate greenhouse gas tracking as one of the first applications. Then savings could be accounted for in energy terms, not just in cash and time terms. This could lead to substantial carbon credit for cities that could be sold in a carbon exchange to pay for other things the city needs.
It might also be cost-effective to employ summer or co-op students with a more recent background in statistics, and more familiarity with software in the field, than fulltime analysts with less recent education. The sophistication of the application is not great, but, there seems to be a bottleneck in the analysis, and more bodies on this might be helpful.
What could happen next?
The system proved to be a good base for 311 service and every other kind of municipal statistics that it has been asked to handle.
A likely next step would be to better standardize and systematize the rest of the City's IT operations. As a CSR system has already been deployed, it would be very simple to determine how much savings are achieved by a regime of boot image control, strict standards for interoperability, longer computer lifecycles and a plan to deploy thin clients and free software and zero e-waste hardware wherever possible.
The project has definitely put Baltimore on the map of innovative cities of the world. The benefits of this are very hard to measure. Baltimore might conceivably be counted with Austin, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, New York, Washington and Los Angeles as one of North America's important high-tech innovation centres.
If all Baltimore's achivements were to be emulated North-America-wide, if federal and state programs and accounting, were to be fully integrated with them, if all major cities were to be run effectively by distributed teleworkers and field staff connected by a 311 system and mobile devices, with only a small core staff watching performance statistics in real time, then, one might reasonably expect to achieve a rather staggering list of benefits:
- increase in social capital and neighbour coherence
- increase in public trust and confidence in government
- increase in effieciency of
画册印刷public and private business
- reduced crime enforcement costs
- improvement in industrial efficiency
- increase in attractiveness as a business location
- reduced car ownership through reduced commuting手提袋印刷
- improved health through reduced car ownership
- reduced health-care costs through increased physical exercise and reduced car ownership
It might be the beginning of a shift away from the industrial or factory model of government, towards a more distributed just-in-time model of how public services are delivered. Or, at least, one way to begin to understand which city services benefit from deeper transparency and distributed delivery, and which don't.
Additional information and sources
Detailed budget: xyz.doc
Project sponsors: xxx
Stakeholders: xxxxx
Further Information:
(You may submit documents, video, audio, additional screen shots, etc. as separate files to clift@publicus.net or create links if they are publicly accessible. Only submit documents that make be publicly shared.)
how to guide (all links)
budget
business case
open source software
survey responses
further analysis aids (e.g. response analysis spreadsheet)
Contacts: officer@edembury.gov.uk Author: A.N.Other