AN INTRODUCTION TO NEW YORK CITY’S

NYCSTAT REPORTING PORTAL AND THE CITYWIDE

PERFORMANCE REPORTING (CPR) TOOL

NYCStat is New York City’s one-stop-shop for all essential data, reports, and statistics related to City services.
Available at www.nyc.gov, NYCStat provides access to a wide array of performance-related information
including citywide and agency-specific information, 311-related data, and interactive mapping features for selected
performance data and quality-of-life indicators.

With NYCStat, New York City is meeting the challenge and the opportunity that web-based technologies
present for helping citizens become directly involved in government. It eliminates the mystery about where and
what kinds of performance information are available and increases accountability to its customers.

WHAT IS AVAILABLE AT NYCSTAT

NYCStat provides quick and easy access to the following reports, data and information:

• CPR, the Citywide Performance Reporting System, an interactive dashboard designed for user-friendly
access to the most critical performance indicators for 45 City agencies, with monthly updates and
automatic evaluation of trends within specified program areas;

• The Mayor’s Management Report, the public report card on City agency performance published twice a
year;

• The NYC*SCOUT web page, which maps street conditions such as potholes and catch basin defects, and
allows users to track the progress of repairs;

• NYCStat Stimulus Tracker, which tracks the City's use of federal stimulus/recovery funds provided
through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

• The City of New York Data Mine catalog, part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency,
and accountability of City government, supplies access to a repository of government-produced, machine-
readable data sets.

• My Neighborhood Statistics (MNS), which maps comparative performance data at the neighborhood level
for approximately 50 selected performance measures;

• Scorecard Cleanliness Ratings, updated monthly for streets and sidewalks throughout the five boroughs;

• 311 Customer Service Center data, including basic operational statistics and community-level reports on
the City’s response to service requests from 311 callers; and

• Citywide Customer Survey Results, from the survey of New Yorker’s opinions on the delivery of City
services.

February 2011
CPR AT-A-GLANCE

A core component of NYCStat is CPR. CPR was launched in February 2008 as an innovative approach to
interactive, transparent performance management. CPR identifies where service delivery by more than 40 City
agencies is trending in a positive or negative direction in an easy-to-use online snapshot format.
CPR improves performance management in three major ways: Accountability, Transparency, and Accessibility,
and offers the following features:
• Tracks performance for the most important "outcome" measures - those directly reflecting how
citizens' lives are affected by government. Many of these measures are being reported for the first
time and represent fresh thinking about how to measure the outcomes each agency is responsible for.
• Measures performance by comparing current data to data for the same period the year before,
thereby holding agencies accountable for year over year improvement.
• Makes performance trends obvious by providing graphical representation of performance, including
pie charts and color-coding to provide early warnings for areas that need attention.
• Drill-down capability, allowing users to review comparative trends over a five year period.
• Aggregates important measures into citywide themes, which cut across agency silos and disciplines to
reveal the overall picture about city government performance.
• Monthly, quarterly or annual updates of each measure – depending on how often the statistic is
produced - so the most recent data is always available.
• Ability to download data for more detailed review and analysis.
• Detailed information about each measure including an explanation of what the measure means, its
reporting frequency and other useful details.

DEVELOPMENT OF CPR

Initial plans for the Citywide Performance Reporting system were developed by the Mayor’s Office of Operations
in consultation with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) in mid-2005.
The CPR project had three components:

1. Performance Management Application (data collection tool) – a back-end shared computer system
providing a single point of access for agencies to input data.
2. Analytics Tool/Dashboard – the front-end system to provide standardized reporting format with drill-
down capacity, performance summaries, and trend graphics.
3. Data Definition – review and identification of the topics (agency “program areas”) measures, and critical
indicators to be included in the CPR system for 44 Mayoral agencies.

All three components continued concurrently through the July 2007 launch of CPR as an internal agency tool. At
this point, CPR data collection and review of performance results were in place for each of the 44 participating
agencies as well as the Mayor’s Office and other oversight units within City government. After reviewing the
product in Summer 2007, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg directed that the CPR tool be made universally available
through the City’s NYC.gov website at the earliest possible date.

Subsequent development work focused on making the online CPR tool as easy and flexible as possible for public
use, in addition to enhancements and revisions to the three basic system components. Public launch of the CPR
online tool was timed to coincide with release of the Preliminary Fiscal 2008 Mayor’s Management Report on
February14, 2008.

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COST

NYCStat and the CPR system was developed as part of a large Information Technology project led by the City’s
Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT). This multi-year, multi-million dollar
project, involving a number of City agencies and offices, focuses on integrating operational data residing in
disparate databases developed and maintained by separate agencies. The effort and resources used to develop
NYCStat and CPR are a relatively small part of this overall project. There were no additional staff hires.

KEY ELEMENTS OF CPR DEVELOPMENT

Key to the development of CPR as an innovative and useful tool for accountability and management was taking a
fresh look at what services agencies deliver and how best to measure the outcome of these services. This data
definition process led to the review and development of a host of new measures, including those that were
central to agency processes and not necessarily final results. In the end several thousand measures were
considered, many of them so new that data collection had not yet begun. In this sea of thousands of indicators the
most important measures, however, were not adequately highlighted, and so ultimately, a two-tier system
separating out approximately 500 critical measures was developed. The majority of these critical measures are
final outcomes and, therefore, measure direct impact of government services on the residents of New York City.
Since these 500 critical measures represent for the most part what is of vital importance to the public, it was a
natural next step—and in line with the goals of accountability, accessibility and transparency—to make this
information available to the public.

On a parallel track with data definition, we also had to make several key
decisions about data presentation, while attempting to provide as flexible and
as useful a tool as possible. In most cases data was available by month, year-
to-date and full year, so there were many choices about how to best slice and
dice the data and make comparisons with prior periods. At the same time, we
had to account for variances in data reporting frequencies and data collection
lag times. Again, a two-tier system was developed to provide the flexibility we
needed.

Other crucial steps in the development of the data presentation included

decision-making about whether to measure year-to-date trends or measure
against pre-set targets; designating the desired direction of each measurement
(i.e. up, down or neutral); and developing thresholds (+/-10%) for good and
poor performance. Finally, decision-making about how to best present the
trend analysis—whether to use colors, data tables, or up/down arrows—was
needed. Ultimately, we selected color-coded pie charts—with red, yellow and Screenshot of NYCstat Home Page
green to represent declining and good/stable performance—as the most user-
friendly presentation on a dashboard.

Finally, in addition to being able to compare agency performance this period to

last year at the same time, we wanted to provide users who may or may not be
familiar with individual agencies or their performance measures with the ability
to view performance at a glance by larger themes. Each of the 525 measures on
the public website falls into one or more of the following broader Citywide
Themes: Citywide Administration, Community Services, Economic Development
& Business Affairs, Infrastructure, Education, Legal Affairs, Public Safety, and
Social Services. Together, these eight themes capture all the ways in which the
City government serves the people who work and live in New York City.

Contact NYCStat:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/nycstat/html/contact/contact.shtml
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