On Feb 14, 2008 New York City unveiled a new online performance management system they called "Citywide Performance Reporting" (CPR). CPR takes 500 key performance indicators, which are updated monthly, and makes them available to the public online. You can visit the New York CPR site here.
With an annual budget of US$58.5 billion, NYC is many times larger than Australia's largest council; however the performance management challenges faced by NYC are still comparable to those faced by Australian local government agencies.
The New York City press release said: "CPR is the culmination of more than two years of work coordinated by the Office of Operations, and involving more than 40 City agencies." The three key benefits of CPR can be summarised as follows:
- CPR uses a standardized reporting format across all agencies and all data types, and provides a single point of access for all users.
- CPR aggregates data across agency into "citywide themes," which represent groups of related services such as infrastructure, education, or public safety.
- CPR will identify problem areas and improve service delivery. It is another step in improving transparency and customer service for New Yorkers.
You can read the full press release here.
Notably, these 3 benefits are very similar to the challenges faced by Australian Local Government agencies. The stated 3 key benefits of the CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions" are as follows:
- Integrate and transform multiple data sources into highly informative metrics and KPI reports for performance management of diverse and competitive Council operations.
- Provide open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.
- Provide planning and reporting from a single reliable source, satisfying a council’s strategic, organisational and compliance requirements.
The following is a screen shot of one of NYC’s online performance reports:
Whilst I have several criticisms of how the CPR data is presented and ultimately therefore it's value to the end-user, I only want to point out two flaws in CPR, which are specifically claimed in the press release as benefits.
- "CPR is trend-based, not target-based. It compares current performance to performance during the same time last year providing a short-term performance trend or "snapshot", intended to be used for real-time decision-making."
In our opinion, comparing current performance to the same time last year does not provide a meaningful trend and I doubt it could be used for real-time decision-making.
- "CPR will offer graphical representation of performance, including pie charts to make performance trends easy to identify."
CPR includes only pie charts. Pie charts are not typically used to identify trends. Pie charts are also often criticized for taking up too much space on a page and that it is not easy to visually compare the size of each slice.
I have provided below an example of the equivalent CPR report from CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions.
(click on image to enlarge)
CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions deliver the functionality Councils need to achieve their many internal planning and reporting objectives. It delivers open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.