4 Cities, 3 Gov Nerds, 1 Mission.
We’re four days in to #MiaStatTrip, and we’re already fully inspired, humbled, optimistic — and geeking out about the impact our lessons learned will have on our City. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, introductions.
My name is Mike Sarasti. Last year, I was hired as the City of Miami’s first Chief Innovation Officer. This past Monday, I set out with Cheriene Floyd (Strategic Planning & Performance Manager) and Ines Mato (Strategic Planning & Performance Analyst) to meet with some best-in-class cities around the topics of government performance management, data analytics, and process improvement.
Sounds geeky? It totally is. The three of us are typically guilty of pontificating on how data-driven government is the truth. We all believe measurement, user feedback, and collaboration are keys to effective problem solving at the City of Miami.
Innovation and Strategic Performance Management are natural allies, both relying on measurement to identify organizational weakness, celebrate progress, and turn the ship around when needed. We’ve been working hard this past year to make data and evidence pillars of our workplace culture. The naysayers would have you believe this is futile.
Luckily, it’s a joyous time to be a government nerd, and we don’t have to think about how to do this alone. Teams elsewhere have been wrestling with this and documenting their efforts for some time. Denver has been training employees since 2012 though its Peak Academy resulting in more than $20 million in savings. Bloomberg’s What Works Cities has been partnering with cities to help them make more data-informed decision making since 2015. (The City of Miami was named a What Works City earlier this year.) Other networks like the Civic Analytics Network and Code for America regularly convene expert practitioners and tirelessly strive for building better communities. We’ve turned to all of them for mentorship, and now we have new friends across the nation that we absolutely love.
These friends are doing amazing work in other cities. And this is the lead up to this week. We just had to see some of this work firsthand, so we planned #MiaStatTrip, targeting cities with established “Stat” programs. The Stat model is a data-driven management framework. It was pioneered in local government over a decade ago by Baltimore, but cities have evolved it in different ways— notably in recent years as technology has made it easier to manage and visualize data. As we thought about how to drive a culture that values data in the City of Miami, we wanted to study the different roads different cities had taken toward this end. After some debate on destinations (because many are doing such great work), we settled on Louisville, Kansas City, Cincinnati and South Bend — four cities fearlessly grinding out data-driven, performance management systems.
So here we are, filled with purpose, and lucky to be on this important adventure to seek knowledge and shape it into something actionable for our beloved Magic City. We’re going to share what we’ve learned because we want to be of service to our city and our fellow gov nerds everywhere.
We’re already working on our Louisville recap, so stay tuned to hear how Daro Mott, Grace Simrall, and company are driving process simplicity, consistency, and innovation.
