It?s worked to fill potholes faster, clean up trashy backyards and cut workplace injuries, and Gov.-elect Martin O?Malley is hoping to bring the same numbers-based management approach to state prisons, its parole system, highways and transit.
“It?s not sexy; it?s a total grind,” Matt Gallagher admitted after running a 90-minute meeting on Thursday at Baltimore City Hall on water and wastewater.
Gallagher is executive director of the award-winning CitiStat program that tracks agency performance on a biweekly basis. O?Malley appointed him Wednesday as one of his two deputy chiefs of staff at the Statehouse.
O?Malley said Gallagher will be charged with bringing the program to the state. “Some departments do not lend themselves as well as others to this approach,” O?Malley told The Examiner. The first departments to be focused on are corrections, parole and probations, juvenile services and transportation.
“There are things that will translate pretty well” to the state level, Gallagher said.
When it was introduced to the city six years ago, Gallagher said the mayor added an agency a month to the program, in which heads of departments and bureaus bring page after page of data sheets that are projected on screens. “We typically argue that almost everything can be measured,” Gallagher said.
The process also helps produce a more open and transparent government, since all the detailed reports are put on Baltimore City?s Web site, Gallagher said.
In the first year of the program, O?Malley attended almost every one of the detailed and lengthy sessions to show that “this is a priority that is not going away,” said City Hall spokesman Steve Kearney, the communications director for the new administration.
It was not clear whether O?Malley would have time to do that at the state level, but his new chief of staff, Deputy Mayor Michael Enright, helped drive the process in the city as well.
While it takes a lot of staff time ? there were more than 40 people at Thursday?s meeting, though several were visitors from state agencies ? Gallagher said there was little money spent on new information technology. Most is off-the-shelf software.
In addition to improving responsiveness to citizen complaints, CitiStat has also resulted in cost savings. It serves “as an early warning system for you financial information,” Gallagher said.
It allows a chief executive to track not just a small number of measurable outcomes, but many. “You have to be careful not to prioritize just three things,” O?Malley said, “or they?ll take all their people off the other nine things.”
“We never advertised it as perfect system or magic elixir,” Gallagher said.
