Data-driven governance earns Cincinnati 'City of Future' title

CINCINNATI -- What would happen if a city’s services were managed, top to bottom, to focus on outcomes rather than outputs?

That’s the question the City of Cincinnati wants to answer.

Writer Susan Crawford highlights the City’s data-driven quest to streamline many government processes in an article for the website Medium.com, “The City of the Future is in Ohio.”

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Crawford says the tech-savvy, responsive governance model is something common in the business world. But the Columbia University professor calls it a “cultural shift” to see a city implement the approach to “affect citizens’ lives from their own individual perspectives.”

It may even start a “national trend.”

“[City Manager Harry Black] is taking desired outcomes — thriving neighborhoods, safer streets, fiscal sustainability — and tying them to written performance management agreements negotiated face-to-face between his office and city department heads. That’s not the only thing he’s doing, though: the performance agreements in turn tie to a performance accountability program, CincyStat, that uses frequently-refreshed, visualized city data to drive relentless assessment of the departments’ work against those desired outcomes and performance goals.”

City Manager Black and Chief Performance Officer Chad Kenney Jr. believe things like “Innovation Labs” will reveal “bottlenecks in operations like the thorny process of obtaining a permit for an alteration of a commercial building.”

Another major highlight of the write-up focuses on the City’s desire to become more transparent by making public information more readily available. The Open Data Cincinnati portal went live April 23.  

“Opening data to the public may not only facilitate transparency generally but it can help departments see what datasets their colleagues in other departments have on tap,” Crawford wrote. “Open data is critical to helping the third floor of city hall know what the second floor is up to.”

But it's not about city hall. It’s about bettering Cincinnati for everyone who calls it home.

“We want neighborhoods to be physically healthy and spiritually happy, so we want to make sure we’re maximizing citizen engagement,” City Manager Black said.