DCStat is part of the District of Columbia’s broad management strategy to increase open governance improve citizen services. DCStat aims to help government agencies operate as leaner, more responsive, higher performance organizations that fulfill their responsibilities to residents. DCStat addresses various problems including inefficient agency operations, inability to share and use data across agencies and inability to deliver services proactively.

DCStat Objectives

DCStat was established as a set of analytical processes and data-driven application tools to support Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ Hot Spot crime reduction initiative and raise the quality of life for District residents through better neighborhood safety and public health. As the capability has grown, other initiatives have been supported by DCStat analytics, including New Communities, Nuisance Properties, Operation Fight-Back and Clean City.

The most significant analytical process within DCStat is the City Administrator’s (CA) Executive Briefing program, which aims to enhance public safety, improve service delivery, reduce costs and increase revenues in the District. These briefings provide a regular forum for District leaders to gain operational transparency into agencies, evaluate performance and hold managers accountable. The briefings also provide a dynamic environment where the CA can reinforce his vision of a culture of continuous improvement, encouraging agencies to adapt and innovate.

Program managers and officials faced two business risks when implementing DCStat. First, agencies were reluctant to cooperate with developers and share data with other officials and agencies. Prior to the implementation of DCStat, agencies collected and used data for internal purposes. DCStat required opening up databases and files to outside scrutiny.

Agency employees also expressed concern that the new automated DCStat system would replace jobs. The automated system promised to make operations, such as data analysis and record-keeping, more efficient and would in turn make manual labor for those jobs obsolete.

DCStat serves four different constituencies and consists of five application “views”: (1) Neighborhood View (2) Mobile View (3) Analyst View (4) Executive View and (5) Residents View. Each view requires varying levels of training and has different levels of interactivity, offering different reporting, mapping, query and analysis functions.

The Neighborhood View is DCStat’s web-based application intended for broad use by District staff. Neighborhood View supports activities of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services for strategic initiatives, including Hot Spots and New Communities. At their desk and during public meetings, Neighborhood Services Coordinators may access up-to-date information regarding city services, crimes and other activities in specific areas of the city. They may produce maps and graphs to analyze incidents, compare geographies and discover trends.

The Mobile View provides access to DCStat using wireless devices. From a PDA, mobile workers query DCStat using site address, service numbers, property owners’ names and other criteria. Mobile workers can obtain a property summary report that identifies owner and tax assessment information, service request history, housing violation citation records and crime activity associated with a property. Details are available through drill-down screens. The system will locate similar nearby incidents to help identify cause or patterns.

The Analyst View will be a secured or private view, available only through special access given by the DCStat administration. It will require a higher level of training and interactivity and will allow for expert dashboard analysis and reporting functions.

The Executive View will be available via the intranet and will require minimal training. Municipal officials will use Executive View to perform executive data analytics once they receive an alert, watch notification or simply access DCStat and want more information on a scenario. This version also will offer reporting functions.

The Residents View is a public version that will be available via the Internet. It will require no training and will allow for basic interactivity that permits residents to perform neighborhood comparisons and view what is happening in their location. This view also will allow residents to perform general mapping and query functions.

District of Columbia officials and managers developed DCStat to make municipal government more efficient, effective, transparent and accountable. To date, DCStat has realized these four goals in the following ways. DCStat:

Provides Data Coordination and Real-Time Data Retrieval

Previous systems only allowed for limited data analysis because of paper-processes, disparate databases and the availability of outdated data. DCStat automatically refreshes data from various city agencies on a regular and frequent basis. Even better, DCStat’s ability to rapidly gather, track and analyze data allows city officials to make decisions based on real-time, dynamic information and current conditions. This reduces wasteful spending and increases revenues, enhances public safety and improves service delivery.

Because DCStat continually monitors performance and service delivery, city managers can pinpoint when and where municipal services are needed the most. DCStat’s GIS mapping capabilities show city officials, via desktop or personal handheld devices, the Hot Spots or troubled areas that need immediate attention. The ability to link data and automatically identify areas in need allows for faster and better decision-making, which dramatically improves the quality of life and business conditions in the District of Columbia.

Increases Government Efficiency

DCStat improves government operations by: (1) Providing access to real-time information; (2) Creating agency specific applications; (3) Improving decision making by providing more data of higher quality; (4) Accelerating data sharing between agencies; (5) Presenting data to the City Administrator in a format that shows agency performance; (6) Increasing transparency within agencies; and (7) Supporting all major initiatives of the City Administrator.

Forges Fiscal Benefits

DCStat also will provide fiscal benefits including:

• Higher performance due to heightened transparency and measurable performance goals
• Faster service delivery times due to residents’ ability to track and follow fulfillment of service requests
• Reduced costs and increased revenue due to efficient allocation of resources, elimination of duplicated efforts, balanced workloads to increase service quality.

Within its first year of operation, DCStat has already achieved over three times its return on investment. The most recent Executive Briefing session identified nearly $7 million in uncollected revenue by analyzing one of the 62 city agencies in the District. Additional cost savings through recommendations to reduce waste and improve performance add an estimated $4 million to the bottom line. In addition to uncollected revenue, DCStat provides potential cost savings by realigning business processes within the agencies and fostering coordination between agencies.

Improves the Citizens Service Request Center (SRC), increasing government transparency and accountability

The District’s dynamic Service Request Center (SRC) offers real-time status of every request, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Residents will be able to access their service request from the Internet using DCStat’s Residents View to place a service request or view the status of a request. Agency employees can access Neighborhood View to map the location of residents’ service requests. The new technology allows agencies to coordinate their efforts to efficiently and effectively respond to the residents’ needs. DCStat shows real-time status at any time, and offers complete tracking of service delivery and agency performance.

Debunks Data Storage for Efficiency and Effectiveness

Prior to the implementation of DCStat, many city agencies used paper-based processes or outdated, inaccessible databases. Disconnected databases across the city stored data in aging legacy systems. Because databases were not linked or accessible to other agencies—and often times even inaccessible to different departments within an agency—information was inaccurate and incomplete.

Develops Interagency Cooperation and Data Access

DCStat allows agencies and departments to share and leverage others’ data, making the allocation of resources more efficient and effective. Managers now can access performance results as well as information about each department and employee. This cross-department and cross-agency data sharing heightens managers’ awareness of the "big picture," making managers more accountable. Data also will be accessible in five views for different audiences depending on the viewers’ level of training and depth of analysis he or she needs. The user community will include: District residents, mobile workers, agency workers, agency and District leaders, and analysts, using Residents View, Mobile View, Neighborhood View, Executive View and Analysts View, respectively.

Leads the Nation’s Cities Through Transforming Government

DCStat is transforming the way municipal government and city services work by bringing private sector efficiencies to the public sector and establishing the District of Columbia as a leader in municipal performance, accessibility and functionality. The unprecedented transparency and accountability driven by DCStat provides a more responsive and effective city government for District residents and businesses.

DCStat aims to help government agencies operate as leaner, more responsive, higher performance organizations that fulfill their responsibilities to residents. DCStat addresses various problems including inefficient agency operations, inability to share and use data across agencies and inability to deliver services proactively.

DCStat was created to support Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ Hot Spot crime reduction initiative and raise the quality of life through improved public health and neighborhood safety. DCStat also is the primary tool supporting the City Administrator’s (CA) Executive Briefing program.

The key features of DCStat are in the areas of data and applications. On the data side, DCStat provides access to near-real-time data from the various DC government agencies that have been integrated in the DCStat data environment. On the application side, key features include the ability to search and analyst available agency data and to view results spatially in map form and other logical groupings in report form.

DCStat utilizes EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) technology to interface agency data into the DCStat data environment on a near-real-time basis. The value to users is up-to-date data on which to base timely decisions and the ability to correlate available agency information for more coordinated actions in delivering services. DCStat application functions include data searching, mapping, watches and address summary.

• Data searching enables users to query and analyze data within the data repository based on type (address, service request, property owner), data range or text string.
• Mapping allows users to select data sets for display on a map, perform map actions (i.e. identify, search, zoom) and gives users the ability to view detailed data records.
• Watches enable users to define monitors of conditions around the District (i.e. number of homicides, number of potholes) and benefit from the near-real-time data interfaces that trigger notification when threshold levels are reached.
• Address summary allows a user to enter an address and obtain a summary of information including the property owner’s name, open/closed service requests, open/closed inspections, open/closed complaints and other property status information.

The District initially developed DCStat to support Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ Hot Spot crime reduction initiative but its uses and applications have grown significantly since idea inception. Most notably, DCStat inspired a cultural shift from one of agencies acting in isolation to a new era of cooperation and cross-agency data sharing.

For example, agency leaders for the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) were eager to change their antiquated systems to DCStat, but some employees expressed concern about implementation. Employees fear about automated systems replacing jobs and concern about the system exposing fraud or abuse made some District employees reluctant to accept DCStat. However, employees soon began to see the benefits and efficiencies of working with an automated system and became more accepting of DCStat.

IV. Methodology/ Process