Measuring but seemingly not performing

ANC6A also sends a letter to the DC Government, asking for the inclusion of additional categories on the online Service Request Center. (The letter should be posted to the ANC6A website within one day.)

Here's my response:

A further improvement would be to publish online the data that results from all the calls. It would add a level of accountability and a bias for action that may not be present in the current system, since the data isn't very publicly available.

E.g., the City Government produces reports on the calls, because it has been mentioned from time to time by various agency officials. But without a light held onto the data, action appears to lag.

So to paraphrase Peters and Waterman, "what gets measured, without getting communicated more widely, doesn't get done" rather than their famous phrase "what gets measured gets done."

Below is something I wrote about this in 2/2004, in themail (slightly edited re the links)

What Gets Measured Gets Done

In the classic business book In Search of Excellence, the authors coined the famous phrase "what gets measured gets done" to refer to companies that outperform their peers because of a greater focus on what matters. Of course, being sure that organizations focus on what matters is always a problem, as is a focus on accountability. Today's Austin American-Statesman talks about how the City of Austin updates 4,000 different performance measures weekly, from library circulation statistics to how the city is meeting its goals, and posts this data to the city website. This is an expansion of their public communication of such data, which since the mid-1990s had been published quarterly.

Similarly, the Citistat program in Baltimore is a finalist in Harvard's Ash Institute annual program highlighting governmental innovation. The program is written about by syndicated columnist Neal Peirce in the article "LESS SECRECY, MORE EFFICIENCY: BALTIMORE'S GROUNDBREAKING "CITISTAT" (1/18/04).

Citistat marries data tracking and analysis with accountability for improvement, comparable to the CompStat program initiated by Jack Maple and William Bratton in NYC, a program which led to big change in policing strategies and tactics, and a concomitant reduction in crime. Peirce quotes Mayor O'Malley stating that “success comes only with constant and intense executive pressure, plus relentless follow-up with departments.”

I looked at the Service Request Center section of the DC Government website , but I haven't been able to locate similar data sets. We need them.