by @BarryRafkind in Civic Action, Government Reform
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 12:02 am
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“We should not have to tell you we are doing well. We should be able to show we are doing well. And if we are falling short in some areas, then you should be able to see that too. ” – Mayor Curtatone, in his 7/15/2011 op-ed to the Somerville News announcing his new ACE program and stating a customer bill of rights.
(here’s the City press release about it from September) .
The initiative involves a municipal webpage to which monthly responsiveness data would be posted for various departments, starting with the DPW and later for 311. Ironically, the webpage hasn’t been updated for three months!
The last data set was posted around the end of November for September’s DPW numbers (at least 2 months late) only after I prodded the City through Twitter. Previously, only the July and Aug DPW numbers were published. Although the program’s announcement promised data on other departments including 311, so far only data for the DPW has been released.
This promised to be one of the most transparent and progressive actions by this mayor. Too bad it appears to have been abandoned. Given this lack of customer service, my question is : when do we get our tax money back?
Screen shot of the ACE webpage at 11:30pm on Jan 3, 2012
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Hi Barry,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will update ASAP. Between the holidays and some unforeseen projects, the ACE page was accidentally overlooked.
one note, though: the data will always appear to be one month late. It takes at least 30 days to collect and process DPW figures.
Finally, we still plan to release other data sets. In fact, we had a conversation with a local company yesterday that specializes in making data more easily accessible to the public.
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Barry,
I’d like to explain how we receive the data, so that people may understand how we are able to report it. Every work order type has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) attached to it. The majority of SLAs have a completion time of 30 days or less. What that means is we need a minimum of 30 days before we can begin to review the data, verify its accuracy and publish the report. When all is said and done we typically need about 45 days to get the final report out (August data is posted in October, September data is posted in November, etc.).
That being said, please accept my apologies for the delay of the October data, we are finishing it now. The November report will be up next week, per the normal schedule.
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Dear Daniel Hadley (SomerStat Senior Analyst) and Steve Craig (Director of Constituent Services 311), thanks very much for your prompt and thoughtful replies! Are either of you in charge of ACE or is someone else?
Daniel, which company are you referring to? How would they make data more easily accessible? Any idea when that might happen? What were those unforeseen projects you mentioned? When will other data sets (presumably for other departments) be released?
Steve, any reason that data couldn’t be released as it becomes available? Ideally, the website report would be automatically generated daily with software and work orders whose SLAs have not yet completed could be labeled as ‘open’. Perhaps that type of thing might come out of the tentative project Daniel mentioned.
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Barry,
You are correct. Ideally, I would love to have the data we’ve been talking about auto-generated on a daily basis and the reports updated real-time. It would be a faster and easier way for us to get this info out to everyone. Unfortunately, we don’t have the technical capabilities to do such a thing right now. Currently, we manually run the report and verify all the data, which is a time consuming process and the reason we do it once a month. If the project Daniel is working on, or any other method of streamlining the process becomes available I would gladly look into it. It’s a win-win all around. Less staff hours would be used making the reports and the public would get the information more quickly.
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