Data, Analysis Drive Maryland GovernmentData, Analysis Drive Maryland Government

Since taking over the state's top spot in 2007, Maryland governor Martin O'Malley has rigorously applied a data-driven model to state government with a program that's being echoed in state and local government nationwide, and most recently in federal CIO Vivek Kundra's TechStat.

Maryland's StateStat director Beth Blauer attributes any number of recent important government decisions and positive changes in the state at least partially to StateStat, a program which evolved out of an effort O'Malley instituted in Baltimore as mayor there in 2000.

Changes include: A reduction in homicides and violent crimes, the closure of dilapidated and unsafe state facilities (a mental institution and a prison), increased mass transit ridership, and a decreased number of structurally deficient bridges, Blauer said.

The key to StateStat's success is several-fold, though much of it arguably comes from having the governor as its chief advocate. "Governing by performance requires a willingness to openly set goals; to openly measure the performance of public institutions and efforts; to broadly share information rather than hoarding it; and to change course when necessary to move the graphs in the right direction," O'Malley told information in response to e-mailed questions.

All of this is still built on the underlying data -- O'Malley called accurate data an "essential and indespensible pre-requisite" to StateStat's successes. However, even inaccurate data can be a catalyst to change, Bauer said. Analysts poring over the data sometimes spot red flags, like an off-the-charts indicator, which become talking points for discussions with state agency secretaries.

In many ways, StateStat actually remains a bit more low-tech in spots than it sounds. There's no central ERP system, and no fancy business intelligence tools at work behind the scenes.

"Some states and cities tend to think it's all about the technology, and make requirements that before you venture down the path, you have to implement all sorts of wizbang, leading-edge technology, whether it's data warehousing or business intelligence tools," Maryland CIO Elliot Schlanger said in an interview, noting that tight state budgets often make those purchases impossible.

"While building on the tools you have is a nice thing to have, it's certainly not a requirement. Governments already do a good job collecting data." The problem, he said, is that they often fail in their analysis of that data. For StateStat, agencies report data to the state, typically via Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, on a regular basis, as the state lacks a single, centralized ERP system. A team of analysts working with Blauer then combs through that data and creates executive briefing memos for members of the governor's staff, depicting the data in charts, graphs and maps and pointing out key issues.

Officials use that data, both geodata and otherwise, as fodder for regular meetings with secretaries of state agencies, which are typically attended by someone from the budget department and the state CIO and often by the governor himself. During those meetings, the governor and his staff confront the agency secretaries on their data, discussing changes and reforms that need to be made.

StateStat has dramatically changed the way the state uses data. Prior to StateStat's inception, said Blauer, who was previously chief of staff in the state's juvenile services agency, the most demanding request for data was an annual report for legislators.

Now, with regular high-pressure meetings with the governor's office, agencies have been forced to reassess their data quality and the type of data they are producing. "It's a difficult thing to say to the governor, I don't know why this happened," Blauer said. "It was that type of pain in StateStat conversations that enabled us to make real change very quickly."

For example, in the first juvenile services StateStat meeting, the first question was about overtime. The governor threw up a chart that showed overtime use for each of the top 25% of employees by overtime used. The governor noted that one individual had made more than $100,000 in overtime in the previous year, and the agency leadership didn't know why.

"At that point, we realized our broad review of data was going to be hugely impacted by this process," she said. "It has created new policies, new processes around overtime, and new data points that previously hadn't even existed."

Overall, agencies meet with the StateStat team as often as once a week for some agencies or as infrequently as once a month. StateStat holds about six meetings a week, with the governor usually showing up to at least one.

In addition to StateStat, Maryland's government also has BayStat, which holds meetings around promoting the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and now RecoveryStat, which manages Maryland's stimulus spending.

As the Obama administration has made openness and transparency a key initiative in the federal government, it has been part of StateStat since day one. "Openness and accountability." O'Malley said, are the backbones of StateStat and CitiStat before it. "Perhaps the greatest value of this model of governance is that it brings government closer to the people it exists to serve."

While the state doesn't yet publish its StateStat data in open, machine-readable forms, it does post reports from StateStat sessions in PDF form, and hosts a variety of interactive maps with data about government performance in localities around the state, such as progress toward installing runoff control systems in various watersheds and mapped views of exactly where the state's budget is being spent and on what.

"We've found GIS mapping an invaluable tool for identifying challenges and opportunities, targeting limited resources with previously unimaginable precision, and engaging our fellow citizens in the performance and accountability of their government," O'Malley said.

Despite StateStat's successes and CIO's Schlanger's assertion that a successful data-driven government effort doesn't need the most advanced technology, that's not to say that Schlanger wouldn't like to see some updates to the technology underlying the process.

"This is all evolutionary, and we have developed a desire to get to the next level, which is marked by the need to cross-pollinate information between agencies, to analyze data on more sophisticated or esoteric levels, and we sometimes find out the IT infrastructure and applications just can't handle it," he said, noting typical state IT department woes like aging software and hardware and federated IT management structures. However, he said, "In certain agencies across the state today, you'll see some efforts to take that to the next level."

He added that, in some ways, StateStat is a driver toward centralization. "The state is a service enterprise, we need to be able to project and measure performance on an enterprise basis because what the citizen sees is not individual agencies but a collection of state services," he said.

For example, the state has created an Oracle-based public safety dashboard that mines data from hundreds of different sources, and in addition to being used by management, it's being used by everyone from officers on the street to courthouse employees to search for any public safety information they need. A similar dashboard is being built for juvenile services. There's also a project underway to replace and consolidate a number of legacy human resources systems.

Another next step for StateStat, Bauer said, is to bring more citizen engagement into the process, to invite the public into a dialog about and contribute to the data to in order to shape policy.