Open Government<\/h3>\n
The Recovery Act is only one tiny part of government transparency. Dan Everett Jr<\/a>. of SAP has written a great blog post<\/a> about the subject and points out that in May the National Academy of Public Administration started soliciting input from the public on how to make the government more transparent at http:\/\/opengov.ideascale.com\/<\/a> (sadly, there\u2019s no moderator on the site, and the nutters have taken over: check out the dialog around making data more accessible<\/a>).<\/p>\n Another Obama administration initiative, the http:\/\/data.gov<\/a> web site is starting to providing lots of other US government data to anybody who wants to analyze it:<\/p>\n \u201cThe purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s a content for applications that can best make use of this data at http:\/\/sunlightlabs.com\/contests\/appsforamerica2\/<\/a><\/p>\n There doesn\u2019t seem to be much uptake so far \u2013 maybe because the first submitted application seems a little trivial \u2013 it lets you play a memory game with photos of FBI Fugitives culled from the FBI’s feeds of fugitives<\/a> (but it doesn\u2019t even tell you who they are!)<\/p>\n In an article on how ARRA Will be a Boon for Business Intelligence<\/a>, Dr. Ramon Barquin reports how education provisions are also driving business intelligence, and gives some examples of mandated metrics as communicated by the Department of Education last month:<\/p>\n The Federal Election Commission provides information about campaign financing<\/a><\/p>\n The State of Washington Transportation Improvement Board, an independent state agency that makes and manages street construction and maintenance grants throughout Washington State, uses Xcelsius dashboards<\/a> to manage the agency\u2019s $200 million of revenues generated from state gas taxes. In a nice example of transparency, they provide the public with the same view<\/a> as the agency\u2019s Executive Director.<\/p>\n Some of the benefits the agency has realized include<\/p>\n New York City has a huge range of different statistics<\/a> available, e.g. my neighborhood statistics:<\/p>\n NYCStat is New York City\u2019s one-stop-shop for all essential data, reports, and statistics related to City services. Available at www.nyc.gov, NYCStat provides access to a wide array of performance-related information including citywide and agency-specific information, 311-related data, and interactive mapping features for selected performance data and quality-of-life indicators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The State of Washington has a public \u201cGovernment Management Accountability & Performance\u201d site<\/a> that provides easy access to dashboards of key performance indicators in areas such as economic vitality, government efficiency, health care, public safety, transportation, etc.<\/p>\n The State of Maryland has \u201cStateStat<\/a>\u201d that provides dozens of key performance indicators from different state agencies (agriculture, environment, general services, state police, transportation, etc.)<\/p>\n The City of Henderson in Nevada<\/a> uses SAP\u2019s Strategy Management software<\/a> to track the strategic planning process, and then provides that information to residents<\/a>:<\/p>\n Other countries are getting in on the act, too. For example, the British Prime Minister has announced that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web and an eager proponent of better access to government data, will be helping the government make more of its data available online<\/a><\/p>\n The Pew Center on the States<\/a> web site has followed state government performance for more than a decade, studying good and bad practices and analyzing what works. Their conclusion is that results-based budgeting systems works: states cut wasteful spending on programs that are not showing results, and instead direct the resources to more effective :<\/p>\n \u201dThe unfortunate truth is that most states today do not have the tools in place to make well-informed programmatic and budget decisions. There is no way\u00a0 to know how much money states lose to mismanaged or underperforming programs. But those states that have begun to make policy decisions based on data Here are some interactive models from the site, using Xcelsius dashboards<\/a> — give them a try!<\/p>\n [kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http:\/\/www.gradingthestates.com\/benchmarker.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”690″ height=”500″]<\/p>\n [\/kml_flashembed]<\/p>\n [kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http:\/\/www.gradingthestates.com\/GPPMoney.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”690″ height=”750″]<\/p>\n [\/kml_flashembed]<\/p>\n [kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http:\/\/www.gradingthestates.com\/allgppgrades.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”690″ height=”650″]<\/p>\n [\/kml_flashembed]<\/p>\n Govtrack.us keeps track of representatives voting records<\/a><\/p>\n Maplight.org \u201cilluminates the connection between money and politics\u201d<\/a> by bringing together the campaign contributions of legislators and their voting records. Check out their intro video<\/a> for a great overview.<\/p>\n The Swivel.com web site features data that furthers public debate and increases transparency<\/a>, and lets people upload and share data from other sources (although the last uploads seem to have been a year ago?)<\/p>\n IBM\u2019s ManyEyes site does something very similar<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The New York Times has a homicide analytics map<\/a>:<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The list above obviously only scratches the surface \u2013 there are many, many other US public sector bodies that are publishing information online.<\/p>\n The scattering of different projects across the different agencies and bodies is similar to the silos of BI projects inside large organizations, with many of the same problems.<\/p>\n There are three in particular that will need to be addressed:<\/p>\n Not enough goals.<\/strong> As Jos van Dongen<\/a> pointed out to me on Twitter<\/a>, the most glaring thing missing from most of these performance dashboards is concrete goals: numbers themselves are meaningless unless you have something to compare them to. <\/p>\n Not enough marketing.<\/strong> There\u2019s not enough emphasis on \u201cwhat you can do with this data\u201d. It\u2019s the classic business intelligence \u201cbuild it and they will come issue\u201d. Right now, the sites above all emphasize what data they have, but few of them have good examples of what you can actually do usefully with the data, or great examples of what others have done. Without this, government BI will face the same problem as many private projects: low usage and no grasp of any return on investment, leading to disinvestment over time.<\/p>\n Not enough standards.<\/strong> As you can tell from the bewildering variety of formats and statistics above, there\u2019s clearly a lack of standards on what should be tracked, and how data can be compared between different states and agencies, and the choice of indicators changes over time.<\/p>\n This is exactly the same problems faced by organizations (right down to the choice of KPIs \u2013 a change of State Governor is much like a change of top executive \u2013 in both cases, they are likely to feel like they have to \u201cchange the agenda\u201d and use different KPIs than their predecessor).<\/p>\n In companies, a BI competency center is the recommended approach, a body that explicitly has the authority to overview the different BI projects that are going on within the organization, and impose standards (tools, metadata, definitions, reporting formats\u2026).<\/p>\n How will this be handled for the US Government? The fact that there are sites that now have the job of gathering information across the country, like recovery.gov<\/a> and data.gov<\/a> will help, and external organizations like the Pew Trust will help encourage areas. But these pressures alone will not be sufficient.<\/p>\n Ultimately, help will probably come primarily from organizations like the United Nations. As part of their work, they help organizations compare performance in various areas, such as education. They publish league tables of countries that encourage participation, and they have the mechanisms required to negotiate standards that everybody can agree on.<\/p>\n These standards are then increasingly used within countries as well — although, just like in organizations, some nations prefer their own, \u201cbetter\u201d or \u201cmore adapted\u201d statistics (cynics might call this \u201cleaving wriggle room to explain away bad numbers\u201d).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the US has now appointed its first ever \u201cChief Performance Officer\u201d, it seems like a great time to talk about other great examples of US government transparency and business intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[154,160,164,204,320,854,911,1083,1151],"class_list":["post-12054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-practice","tag-benchmarking","tag-bi","tag-bi-competency-center","tag-business-intelligence","tag-dashboard","tag-public-sector","tag-sap","tag-transparency","tag-xcelsius"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/image13-1.jpg?fit=690%2C443&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-38q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"image13\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image13.jpg?resize=690%2C443&ssl=1\" "\\"image13\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image241\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image241.jpg?resize=690%2C570&ssl=1\" "\\"image241\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image42\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image42.jpg?resize=690%2C248&ssl=1\" "\\"image42\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"image34\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image34.jpg?resize=690%2C702&ssl=1\" "\\"image34\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nFederal and Regional BI Examples<\/h3>\n
\n
![\"image101\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image101.jpg?resize=692%2C517&ssl=1\" "\\"image101\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image23\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image23.jpg?resize=690%2C451&ssl=1\" "\\"image23\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\n
![\"image16[1]\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image161.jpg?resize=690%2C379&ssl=1\" "\\"image16[1]\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image.jpg?resize=690%2C427&ssl=1\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image1.jpg?resize=690%2C425&ssl=1\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image2.jpg?resize=690%2C518&ssl=1\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image3.jpg?resize=690%2C459&ssl=1\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThink-Tanks and Watchdogs<\/h3>\n
\nmeasuring the performance of government, a process called \u201cperformance-driven budgeting,\u201d have saved impressive amounts of money\u2014some in very short periods of time. The choices they have made have not been easier, but they have been smarter.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"image52\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image52.jpg?resize=690%2C564&ssl=1\" "\\"image52\\"")
<\/a>
\nThe excellent Grading the States<\/a> web site puts the Pew data into dashboard format, making it easy to compare states\u2019 performance.<\/p>\n![\"image43\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image43.jpg?resize=692%2C571&ssl=1\" "\\"image43\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Get](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.adobe.com\/images\/shared\/download_buttons\/get_flash_player.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image82\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image82.jpg?resize=692%2C530&ssl=1\" "\\"image82\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image911\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image911.jpg?resize=692%2C377&ssl=1\" "\\"image911\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThird-Party Sites that Promote Government Transparency<\/h3>\n
![\"image62\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image62.jpg?resize=692%2C503&ssl=1\" "\\"image62\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image72\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image72.jpg?resize=692%2C583&ssl=1\" "\\"image72\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"image4[1]\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/image41.jpg?resize=690%2C418&ssl=1\" "\\"image4[1]\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nOptimizing BI from Governments<\/h3>\n