Performance Trends App in NYC

A recent NY Times article goes into detail on how the New York City (NYC) Mayor is tracking his agenda targets and ‘promises’ made to constituents. It also provides an overview of the application Xentity and CARTO developed, deployed, and  supports which provides insight into the progress the mayor’s office is making.

Additional releases on this work includes:

Some extracts from the NYTimes Article:

How’s the Mayor Doing? A Color-Coded App Can Answer That

Mayor Bill de Blasio has a reputation for being inattentive to the minutia of governing New York City, favoring broad policy initiatives to nuts-and-bolts metrics. But behind the scenes, his top aides maintain a painstakingly detailed collection of the mayor’s public promises, and his progress in achieving them.

Each of the promises — 228 during the campaign, and more than 1,000 over all so far — is tracked on a color-coded smartphone app: Red is a bad sign, green is a good one, and a check mark is the goal.

Read Full Article here

There are 18 people in the mayor’s office of operations who spend at least some of their time attending to the commitments. The administration has built on, and improved, the Bloomberg-era tools that allowed City Hall to measure the huge flow of data collected by city government. In addition to a massive screen in City Hall, a holdover from the Bloomberg administration, the data also flows onto desktop computers and into the pockets of deputy mayors, chiefs of staff and other top officials on their smartphones.

The “dashboard” provides the most recent statistics, sortable by agency, in order to flag problems daily, and they eventually end up in the mayor’s management report. (A preliminary version of the report was released on Monday.)

The verve for data is driven by the first deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, and shepherded by Mindy Tarlow, the head of the mayor’s office of operations, who describes herself laughingly as “the Rain Man of city government,” a reference to the fictional 1980s Hollywood savant.

“This is how we manage,” said Mr. Shorris, displaying a dashboard app that blared red to show trends in the wrong direction. “Because I’m a dark kind of guy, I have them sorted by worst to best. Because if things are going well, I don’t have to worry about them.”

While 20 top officials carry the commitments app, and several dozen more have the mobile dashboards, the mayor does not have either on his BlackBerry smartphone, preferring to get updates directly from Mr. Shorris. (Neither would work on his flip phone, which he favors for many calls.)