Earlier this year, we had an opportunity to host the Innovation & Technology team from South Bend, Indiana for a knowledge exchange session covering data management, open data, performance management, and various other topics. Simply put, we learned a lot from what they shared – starting with the elegance of their team’s motto “listen first, build with.” 

Big snowstorms have serious implications for city operations, with one lesser-known impact being that the Syracuse Fire Department (SFD) has to shovel all of the roughly 5,700 fire hydrants in the city. The Fire Department recognized an opportunity to track the status of hydrant shoveling in real time and, consequently, to better allocate their resources during a storm. So, SFD approached our Office of Analytics, Performance, and Innovation (API). 

As one of our more behind-the-scenes departments, our assessment employees are some of the unsung heroes of city government.  They’re a small department with big responsibilities which include functions like providing accurate and equitable assessments on the value of every city property, processing residential property exemptions, the processing of deeds, as well as ensuring one-time additions for services are applied to resident taxes, like when your street gets its slurry seal.  

Here in Syracuse, we have 41,500 properties city-wide with 10 staff members within the assessment department, that’s a lot to manage and track with their many functions and all in the tides of a quickly changing housing market that has seen unprecedented change in the last 3 years. This has caused our Equalization Rate (a score delivered by the State that tells us the level of our property assessments across our property base) to fall quite significantly over the last 5 years.  

In early 2020, API participated in a 10-week learning opportunity through What Works Cities at Results for America focused on helping cities learn how to take immediate steps toward ending or reducing the impact of driver’s license suspension in their communities. In the US, driver’s license suspension due to nonpayment of fines and penalties, or failure to appear for traffic court, is legal in many states and municipalities but results in loss of economic opportunity, and autonomy, and reduces public safety. The opportunity, hosted by What Works Cities in partnership with the Fines and Fees Justice Center and the City of Durham Innovation Team, prompted us to evaluate the impact of debt-based license restrictions on our own community by looking at quantitative data on the concentration of driver’s license suspensions by census tract disaggregated by suspensions due to failure to pay or “appear.”

When Syracuse devised its City’s Cloud-based data platform, it became evident that the first step towards creating a data-driven culture was breaking data silos by cataloging, cleaning, combining, and consolidating datasets that existed in numerous systems across multiple departments. 

As datasets constantly evolve and grow, the need to proactively monitor changes, update systems, and evaluate the usefulness of our data was also evident.  Thus determining broader data policies as an ongoing citywide program was needed. We called this our City’s data governance program. 

That led to June 2022, when the City of Syracuse started its Data Governance Committee to enable the organization to create a data ecosystem where our data assets are easier to find and access, and our data practices maintain responsible, ethical, and safe standards of use that comply with legal requirements. 

Here in Syracuse, we spend a big chunk of our budget on purchasing goods and external services: everything from office supplies to hiring consultants to audit a specific department, to multi-million dollar construction projects. Given that we are a major spender in our community, it's about time we take a long hard look at our procurement practices and ensure that we are cultivating vendor diversity, equitably distributing our resources, and continuously achieving improved outcomes.

Roads in the City of Syracuse have it rough. Every day, thousands of cars drive along them, they endure brutal weather conditions and let’s not forget the copious amounts of road salt used to help drivers during the region’s tough winters. During the construction season, the City of Syracuse undertakes road reconstruction projects to repave and patch some of its roads.

But how does the city decide which roads should undergo reconstruction? Earlier this year, API worked with Corey Driscoll Dunham, the Chief Operating Officer of the City of Syracuse, the Department of Public Works (DPW), and the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) to examine the City's road reconstruction process, better understand how factors like race and income are correlated with the roads the city has paved in the past and build safeguards into the process to ensure that historically under-served populations and demographic groups are not overlooked by the city’s road reconstruction efforts.

Over the summer our office was fortunate to have hosted a cohort of very bright and driven interns, you’ve met them in a few of our previous blog posts you can read HERE. During our time together we had the pleasure and privilege to get to know these wonderful young women and work alongside them on a number of different projects and programs where their fresh perspectives and ideas proved to be invaluable to us. Before they left us to get back to their studies at Harvard and Syracuse University we asked them to summarize the work they completed with us over the 8-week internship and to highlight some of their favorite projects. Please read on to see how their summer went and all the great work that they helped us to accomplish!

“Our work changed a lot during the pandemic.” We’ve heard this phrase quite a bit over the last couple of years as we (the global “We”) have adjusted – and readjusted several times over – to a world in which face-to-face interaction – a fundamental piece of what makes us human, was no longer safe. Now, just over two years since we went from in-person meetings, coffee chats, and sticky note-on-the-wall workshops to shared WebEx screens and 9x9 little square faces on our laptops, we’re slowly starting to venture back into the formerly comforting but now unknown territory of in-person interaction. For local government innovators, this transition “back” – even in small increments, is a welcome (understatement) change.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about our process improvement project for some of our Human Resource Department forms, specifically their Employee Update and Personnel Requisition forms. The forms ensure that new employees can be hired; current employees can retire, and any other employment status changes can be processed in an accurate and timely manner.

In this post we will share what changes were made to these forms and their processes, the impact our work has had on the processes themselves, reflect on things that we did well in this project as well as the lessons we’ve taken away from this project.

After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many voices were raised in Syracuse and around the county advocating for transparency in policing and technology that is used by law enforcement and other government departments, among many other things. Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh then continued his dialogue with residents and community groups regarding police reform and government transparency…

You know that feeling when you hear the street sweeper coming down the street and you make a beeline to move your car? - but alas you’re too late and now you’ve got another ticket to add to your collection of four! Of course you do! How are you going to pay off all those tickets?

Listen to Mayor Walsh articulate his vision for the City, and you will hear him describe his goal to transform Syracuse into a more data-driven city. But that process is not something that just happens on its own; it takes work and a data-driven culture needs to be nurtured. When the Federal Government passed the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) to provide funding to state and local governments around the United States in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Syracuse received $123 million and the Mayor saw this as an opportunity to foster and promote better data practices throughout the City.

If you've read our blogs, visited our office, or been to our workshops, chances are you'll see process maps at some point. My colleague Jess wrote a great blog post about it. Process mapping is a tool that has become an integral part of a larger body of work that encompasses about a quarter of most "innovation" projects handed to us -- the problem identification phase.

The role and mission of our team has been constantly evolving since our inception as a Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Team in 2015. As part of a cohort of I-Teams, our team members spent the majority of our efforts focused on solving one high-priority issue per year. Past priority areas have included: Water and Road Infrastructure, Economic Opportunity, Housing Stability, Permitting, and Quality of Life.

In our current iteration as the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation, over time our mission has grown to take on a larger and more diverse set of challenges, including leading cross-department change management and data analysis projects, operating an open data portal, guiding the City’s data infrastructure and governance, and managing the City’s performance management strategy, among other supporting roles and responsibilities.

As this transition gradually occurred over time, we found ourselves spread too thin, with too many projects and not enough team members to adequately support our many initiatives. To help address this, we instituted three changes to how our team operates so that we can better serve our colleagues across City departments and deliver better services to our fellow City residents.

Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.

Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.

We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.

Contemporary forms of government are marked by the rise of indicators, measures, and new metrics to compare, certify, codify and evaluate performance.

Cityline has always been a portal to communicate with the residents, understand their concerns and find ways to address them, but a strong program is only successful if it continues to meet the needs for which it was intended, and for that, it has to be relevant, easy to use, and efficient.

So much of city life in Syracuse and in other cities operates in what is known as the “right-of-way,” which is space that is maintained and regulated for public use. Regulating the public right-of-way helps to make sure infrastructure is safe and usable.

What is the quality of the City of Syracuse sidewalks? This question though simple in its ask is much more difficult to answer.

As our Performance Management Fellow Mojdeh will work with City Departments to establish metrics that will be used to measure their operational performance, interview Department employees to understand their processes and data capture methods, and communicate performance insights through data visualizations and dashboards and will manage a city-wide, cross-departmental performance management program.

A process map is a tool using a flowchart to illustrate the flow, people, as well as inputs, actions, and outputs of the process in a clear and detailed way. A good process map will reflect the work that is actually done within a given process, not what the intended or imagined workflow might entail. This means in order to build a good process map you should be talking to and learning from the folks that use the process every day, not just the people that oversee the process.

Another Earth Day has come and gone, but we can have a healthy, climate-friendly impact on the planet and our community, year-round. One way that our city can accomplish exactly this is by improving its urban tree canopy.

Although it might not always seem obvious, there is a special place in the world for pilots, and they are especially helpful in organizations that don’t have a large number of expendable resources required to take on big financial or public-facing risks. Whether you’re a curious resident or a fellow local government worker, understanding the value in not only trying new ideas but also testing them out, is important.

Personnel requisition and employee update processes are vital to ensuring that new employees can be hired, current employees can retire, and any other employment status changes can be processed in an accurate and timely manner. Through mapping the process and keeping benchmarks of our progress on this project, API is trying to identify every possible place where process changes could be made.

In my last article in December 2020, we talked about the process of establishing a Project Management Office in city government. Now that the PMO is set up and we have most of everything we need, we started taking on projects in compliance with the new project management model.

Last summer, the Parks department and API worked to update paper processes to maximize efficiency and improve data collection, which better serves constituents in the City.

In 2018 our former Director of Innovation started a program over the summer aimed at changing the innovative culture in City Hall with the aspirations of identifying and executing a process improvement project that was meaningful and would impact a number of departments. The API office's ideation luncheon sparked the interest of many and we got a variety of ideas and suggestions.