A crucial part of every successful performance management program, — really, of any program — is communicating outcomes. To engage local constituents, the ability to capture their attention and tell them a compelling story is vital.

Some people’s pet peeve is loud chewing; others hate the Oxford comma. Here’s mine: thumb drives.  First of all, can we choose one name for these things? They’re also referred to as “flash drives,” “jump drives,” and “USB drives,” plus a few other names. Let’s choose...

We stand with those fighting against racism and police murdering black people and unequivocally believe that Black Lives Matter.

A city dashboard’s primary goal is to give citizens a clear, user-friendly tool to see how well their city is doing. When designing your dashboard, always keep in mind how easy it would be for the average citizen to use. If you include too many factors into your...

Data can be powerful. But to really harness your data, you need people skilled in analysis, data management, and data-informed decision-making. Many cities are taking that lesson to heart and launching their own data academies to help employees learn to use data better.

Open data is great because it’s open. But not all data is meant to be open. A lot of it is “sensitive.” What could be “open data” is often classified as “sensitive data” to protect the personal information and identity of individuals. Sensitive data may be restricted...

One day last fall, I was talking with a colleague about a question that had come up from our partners in Baltimore’s performance management program, CitiStatSMART. Those folks were looking to identify key performance indicators (KPI) to use with certain city...