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Grading the Cities introduction THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Introduction: 35-City Average Grade: C+
But fear of the millennium was a very useful wake-up call to get cities thinking about the way they should be running their IT operations. It was, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s famous remark, the kind of hangman’s noose that tends to concentrate one’s attention. Communities from coast to coast had already been fast-tracking management innovation in IT for a variety of reasons; but Y2K drove them extra hard, and as time goes by, they will not regret it.
Buffalo didn’t just make its antiquated computer systems Y2K compliant; it put in 27 brand-new ones — including a very impressive integrated financial management and human resources system. Houston’s government relies on decentralized computer systems, run by individual departments, and as a result is full of redundant systems, which make it difficult to gather and use information. “The Y2K project pretty much brought this to light,” says Coy Baskin, assistant director of finance and administration there. “We realized we need to do a technology assessment on our systems, and see where does it make sense to consolidate.”
Or consider Washington, D.C. As recently as July 1998, the city’s entire Y2K program consisted of one employee, and that one was working on the project half-time. There simply was no program. When Suzanne Peck came on the scene as chief technology officer, she had to move fast. And she did. The city made it through New Year’s Eve with barely a hitch.
But that isn’t the only victory. Y2K, says Peck, stimulated “the first comprehensive citywide inventory of IT assets that the city had ever had. A meticulous inventory discovered 65,000 pieces of embedded chips, 16,000 PCs and 378 IT systems. This information literally did not exist before.”
Of course, Y2K was no magic bullet. IT management in many of the nation’s largest cities is still a relatively new process, and although every city is working at improvements, there’s still a lot to be done.
Some city governments are making heroic efforts at standardization, getting rid of the old stovepipe systems that make sharing information difficult. Almost all cities now have master contracts in place to make the procurement of commodity items reasonably easy. And all are using the Internet to communicate with citizens. When Cleveland’s Web site went on line about six months ago, all 35 of the cities in our study could report that they had sites of their own. These vary in quality, of course, but the vast majority of the ones with weaker sites know they’re behind the curve and are trying to catch up.
Fortunately, spiffing up a Web site is a relatively straightforward task. Developing a strategic plan for a city’s IT future is somewhat more elusive. Most senior information officers think it’s a swell idea to do long-term planning. And some cities, including Phoenix, Chicago and Minneapolis, have detailed planning mechanisms that drive the use of technology throughout their bureaucracies. Minneapolis, for example, has a three-year IT plan, updated regularly, to ensure that all its investments align with the city’s overall goals. More than 150 people are involved in the process, which covers every department, as well as citywide projects. Each approved effort is reviewed by an internal IT architecture management team to ensure there is compliance in process, data, technology and application standards. “It’s as good a plan as I’ve ever experienced, in the private sector as well,” says Don Saelens, the city’s chief information officer, who has extensive experience in both worlds.
But Minneapolis is the exception, not the rule. Most cities aren’t strong in strategic planning for IT — a difficult process at best in an area where last year’s innovation is this year’s fad is next year’s antique.
Boston has done little long-range thinking in this area after being badly burned a few years ago by a major consulting firm that promised to do the job. “It was very late in its delivery, the information was dated and didn’t reflect the current state of the department,” says one IT official. “We felt like we had lost time during that period, focusing on a strategic plan, rather than moving forward with some projects that we could have been implementing.” Or, as one Nashville official puts it, “it’s fine to think down the road, but you’d better keep yourselves on the road as you’re looking down it.”
Another obstacle that confronts many cities is training. New financial management and human resource systems give managers the capacity to create their own customized reports. But the sad truth is that many managers don’t have the knowledge to use it.
It’s not that efforts aren’t being made. Many vendor contracts include provisions for training. Experiments in online training and so-called “train the trainer” efforts are common. But few cities think they’re doing enough, even for IT specialists. “The last six years, not including this year, our department got zero budgeting for training,” says John J. Zebracki III, director of data processing in Buffalo. “This current year is the first year we got any money — $30,000. It’s so lagging that it’s remarkable.”
The truth is, it’s a lot easier to get money from a city council to buy a new computer system than to teach people how to use it properly. And the need for training is growing exponentially. “Given the explosion of IT, there’s no such thing as sufficient training,” says Jim House, chief administrative analyst in Los Angeles. The city council there has made a clever effort at keeping its staff well trained by creating a PC-purchase-incentive program, so any employee can buy a PC and finance it through payroll deductions at 0 percent interest. The reason: “Computer literacy,” says House.
And that’s the name of the game.
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In years to come, when IT managers in local government talk about the Y2K bug, they may do so with a nostalgia in their voices. Of course, it wasn’t exactly a picnic making sure their electronic infrastructure didn’t crash in a jumble of nonfunctional traffic lights, stalled elevators and lost paychecks. Resources were stretched close to the breaking point in the Y2K war, and much sleep was lost.