Meet Performance Measures – Our Latest Enhancement to our Operational Performance Solution
Today we’re excited to introduce OpenGov Performance MeasuresTM – a new product that enhances our operational performance solution and helps governments track their progress, make more informed decisions, and drive better outcomes.
While the national economy is recovering from the Great Recession, many state and local governments are experiencing declining revenues and are re-evaluating how they allocate their budgets across programs. Numerous finance directors, management analysts, department heads, and city and county administrators have told us they want to track their performance to determine which programs are working and deserve more funding. But existing performance-tracking tools (like Excel spreadsheets) must be manually updated, which is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone process. In fact, many governments told us it takes them between two days and two weeks to collect data from departments, convert all the data to the same format, and report on it.
OpenGov Performance Measures overcomes these challenges. It’s part of our OpenGov Smart Government Cloud, so it taps into a government’s financial and operational data and automatically updates the metrics it’s tracking. Our operational performance solution is fully integrated with our budgeting and planning solutions so governments can use their current and historical performance to inform future strategic plans and budgets. Governments can customize the metrics they track in Performance Measures, create alerts to notify them when goals are reached, and provision access to a person, department, or the entire organization. And governments can compare their performance to the more than 1,600 other governments on the OpenGov network.
Here’s an example of a parks and recreation Performance Measures dashboard:
More than a dozen governments were involved in the beta of OpenGov Performance Measures and helped shape it – including Bernalillo County, NM; the City of San Rafael, CA; Harford County, MD; the City of Dayton, OH; and Kern County, CA.
The City of San Rafael, located 20 minutes north of San Francisco, is a popular rest stop for homeless people in California traveling north and south. Last year the city experienced a spike in brushfires due to illegal campsites. Brush fires are a major issue in the west; especially during the summer months. So the Bay Area suburb launched a program to reduce the number of illegal campsites and brush fires, and is now using Performance Measures to track its performance against the program’s goals, and inform its strategy moving forward.
“Performance shouldn’t be a dirty word. To run an effective government, you have to track your performance,” said City of San Rafael Senior Management Analyst Rebecca Woodbury. “We’re excited to use OpenGov Performance Measures to help us track our performance on a number of programs, and then use that information to refine the programs themselves to make them even more successful.”
If you’re interested in learning more about how we help governments improve operational performance, drop by our booth (#816) at the ICMA Annual Conference October 22-25 in San Antonio. And if you think operational performance is out of reach, download our new ebook, Making Public Sector Performance Management a Reality. It explains how driving operational performance as a program is more feasible than ever before.
Category: OpenGov Updates