It’s become clear since his May 3rd inauguration that Mayor Landrieu will be adopting a performance management policy, like Baltimore’s CitiStat model, to improve the delivery of city services to the public.
Times-Picayune reporter Michelle Krupa has been following government reforms being implemented by Mayor Landrieu to shift away from the closed government policies of… »

The Times-Picayune story about Mitch’s policy shift toward a statistical approach to governance read like the NolaStat policy research paper.
Implementing a data-tracking program will require major improvements in computer technology across city government, Kopplin said. “Everything is paper, and what we put in computers, the systems don’t talk to the systems in other agencies,”… »

New Orleans City Business reporter Jennifer Larino wrote an excellent article a couple of weeks ago on the reforms Mayor Landrieu will need to tackle to in order to modernize the city’s IT infrastructure.
The administration has already begun to shift toward adopting NolaStat recommendations:
One of the more significant changes the interim CIO is expected… »

More than three years ago, Citizen Crime Watch was created to advocate for improved public access to 911 calls for service crime data. With heightened public concerns about rising crime after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department was doing a poor job of keeping the public informed about shifting patterns of crime. The calls… »

What is the New Orleans Police Department’s COMSTAT process? What should we know about it, and how should we evaluate it?
These are questions that remain unanswered by a story printed in today’s Times-Picayune.
One concern is that the process creates internal competitive pressures that can tend toward corruption of statistics.
But COMSTAT also has its share of… »

I don’t wish to be placed in the position of being an apologist for any public official’s misdeeds. On the other hand, sloppy journalism is equally intolerable.
Consider a Tennessee TV news report that slanted its story to make Ronal Serpas look like he was cooking the books on Nashville crime statistics. Fundamentally lacking from that… »

In an address delivered at his swearing in ceremony on Tuesday, newly-appointed New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Ronal Serpas sounded as though he’d practically lifted language off the pages of Citizen Crime Watch and NolaStat.
I was particularly surprised to read that Serpas was going to partner with educational institutions. A key focus of the Citizen… »

The civil service system used in New Orleans city government is decades behind the times, and is in desperate need of an overhaul, according to a report prepared by the George Bush School of Government & Public Service for the Business Council of New Orleans.
That conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone in New… »

Mayor Landrieu is looking at performance management models in other cities, he said today on WWL. Among the models he likes are the Baltimore CitiStat performance management process, and the D.C. CapStat process — both inspirations for the NolaStat reform recommendations.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino recently demonstrated to Mitch how the Boston 311 system works…. »

As a civilian tech who supported the New Orleans Police Department COMSTAT process during the reform period of Superintendent Richard Pennington, I experienced firsthand the leadership exhibited by Ronal Serpas on a weekly basis for three years. While Pennington was setting the high-overview priorities to reform the NOPD (in partnership with federal authorities and change… »