Local News

Here’s how Boston is ‘scoring’ on its data initiative eight months after its launch

The mayor's office launched CityScore in January.

August 16, 2016

3 minutes to read

Boston’s CityScore dashboard on August 16.

Boston scored a 1.06 on Tuesday, which means that, all things considered, the city is performing slightly above average.

The score, which you can see for yourself on a mini model that resembles Fenway’s Green Monster scoreboard, is one real-time figure meant to reflect how the city is doing in delivering its key services.

Eight months after the launch of the scoring system, CityScore, Mayor Marty Walsh and some of his top administrative officials gathered Tuesday for a roundtable discussion to reflect on how the initiative is working, and how they would like to see it improved in the future.

“We learned a lot on efficiency,” Walsh said. “Before CityScore was set up, we had a lot of people in City Hall who were never appreciated before for the work they were doing that was going well. Now, more often than not, we can look back and find that we’re running the operation more efficiently.”

To calculate the score, CityScore looks at 21 metrics from different city departments and combines them into one number that represents the city’s overall performance on that day. Scores are compared to either a goal set by the city or a historical performance average. A score of “1” means the city is meeting its target, a score less than 1 means the city is failing to meet its target, and a score exceeding 1 means the city is outperforming its target.

The purpose is to give city officials — and residents — a general sense of how the government performs on a day-to-day basis, and to highlight areas that need improvement.

The city has already put the numbers to use in order to make improvements. When the initiative launched, EMS response times for the previous month averaged 5 minutes and 59 seconds. That number grew to 6 minutes 11 seconds by April 2015, putting it in the “red zone” and causing its CityScore to drop below 1.

After investigating why the response times slowed, officials learned that increases in visitors and the city’s resident population led to a rise in 911 calls, but the EMS budget hadn’t grown to allow for more EMTs or to replace old ambulances. In this budget cycle, Walsh allocated money to train a new class of 20 EMTs and buy 10 replacement ambulances.

“This allows the mayor to be proactive,” said the mayor’s chief of staff Dan Koh. “There’s usually an explanation on a daily basis if things are in the red. If we see trends, we’re able to tackle them before it becomes a long-term issue.”

Now, the city is focusing on its fire department response times. The department aims to have a 90 percent success rate of getting its first company vehicles on the scene within 4 minutes. Right now, the current performance is 84 percent. The city is using data to help analyze how traffic patterns impact response times.

In addition to fire department response times, the city is also investigating how to better standardize performance in its 311 call center. Officials would also like to make definitions on the metrics public, so users can understand that “Graffiti on-time %” means the amount of time in which it took to remove graffiti.

Right now, all metrics are weighted equally and the standard of performance hasn’t changed for any of the metrics, but Citywide Performance Manager Christopher Dwelley said the city could consider making adjustments in the future.

“Right now we show actual performance against the stated target, but we’re looking into deep dives in each metric,” he said.

Boston recently trademarked CityScore and launched a shareable toolkit that users can work with to create their own version of CityScore. Officials from Miami, as well as Providence, Rhode Island, and South Bend, Indiana are currently experimenting with the possibility of adopting their own versions. The Green Monster interface, however, will stay as an exclusive Boston design.

“Not every city loves Fenway Park as much as we do,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s chief information officer. “Fenway does give it a uniquely Boston spin, so for now we’re sticking with the Green Monster.”