What gets measured gets done

When Martin O'Malley was sworn in as mayor of Baltimore in 1999, he inherited a $153 million deficit and 16,000 city employees who, he said, were "wallowing in a culture of failure." O'Malley identified the source of citizen frustration with Baltimore's high crime rate, failing schools and broken streets as "a fundamental lack of accountability and sense of mission when it came to what government was supposed to be doing day in and day out."

That was 10 years ago. Since then, Baltimore has reduced waste by more than $350 million, reinvesting those savings in programs that have reduced violent crime, improved access to affordable housing, returned blighted property to commerce, accelerated street repairs, built modern schools and expanded drug treatment programs.

Baltimore's now widely-acclaimed CitiStat process to improve performance accountability was adapted from the New York Police Department's successful CompStat process. Mayor O'Malley introduced performance review to all of Baltimore's agencies, extolling the virtue that "things that get measured are things that get done." The key lesson that the NYPD and Baltimore learned is that performance review as part of an annual budget cycle is insufficient. Department heads have to be held to budget and performance goals on a weekly or biweekly basis.

To ensure that his initiatives and achievements aligned with public priorities, Mayor O'Malley published all CitiStat performance reports on the Baltimore Web site. This gesture to improve transparency and accountability to the public was also an important way to counteract the natural competitive tendency of public officials to "cook the books." Washington, D.C., went one step further when it implemented its CapStat process. The D.C. Digital Public Square and the Apps for Democracy contest were both based on the notion that access to government data is a basic right in a digital world, and that democratizing data would spur innovations that improve public knowledge about government operations.

As any fan of the TV series "The Wire" knows, New Orleans is in some ways remarkably similar to Baltimore. It's no surprise that producer David Simon's next TV project is based in New Orleans. Both are historic, demographically diverse port cities, but both have also suffered through economic disinvestment and underperforming schools, while competing with one another over the years for the ignoble title of murder capital.

Right now, what separates New Orleans from Baltimore is 1,000 miles -- and 10 years of government reform.

No family could ever live within a limited budget or fulfill its dreams if it only reviewed its finances and priorities once a year. Government is no different in the need to balance its checkbook on a weekly basis to avoid financial disaster, and to frequently review how well it's doing to achieve its goals. What we know from the "stat" models is that we can both eliminate waste and answer community priorities for how limited resources are spent, if we engage in a weekly process of performance management.

In fact, New Orleans has already experienced a successful performance management reform. Former Police Chief Richard Pennington pioneered the ComStat process to reward smart commanders who demonstrated effective leadership and tactics.

With city elections just months away, we have an opportunity to enact real change. We need to make sure that a performance management process is implemented, eliminating future fiscal crises while also guaranteeing an improved government response to our needs no matter who sits in the mayor's chair.

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Brian Denzer of New Orleans is a geographic information systems developer and the creator of CitizenCrimeWatch.org and NolaStat.org whose research was recently funded by the Open Society Institute. His e-mail address is briandenzer@gmail.com.