Providing visibility into municipal performance

I was recently forwarded a link to an interesting New York City online reporting tool. The purpose of the tool is to provide visibility into the city's service performance. As a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, it is a tough pill for me to swallow with the next statement I am about to make. This is a pretty cool system for New York city and a government agency to develop.

The City Performance Reporting (CPR) tool provides performance results and outcomes organized by 8 citywide themes, such as Education and Public Safety. The purpose of CPR provides transparency and accountability for city services to the "users" of these services...New York city residents.

Some of the features that CPR provides includes aggregation of metrics, year over year performance, traffic lighting for variances, metric definitions and graphical representation of data. One additional feature that I thought was interesting was the general trends up or down for the aggregate of all performance metrics. For example, the number of measures that are improving versus the number of measures that are declining (screenshot to the left).

In comparison to some of the solutions that I have seen deployed, this one is pretty basic. That being said, the fact that the city has identified the performance measures that are critical for city services and has changed processes to capture these metrics, it is an important first step. To then "expose" this information to the general public in a live reporting system shows that they have committed to hold themselves accountable.

Based on reading the cryptic URLs while clicking through the different reports, it looks like CPR is using the Oracle Siebel Analytics tool. Just a guess.