Taking the Public Pulse |
How do you give New Yorkers a voice? How do you bring them into the system? How do you find out what they want? And then once you collect that data, how do you turn it around and how do you produce results?
nyc.gov is sort of the front line. Right now, every city agency and dozens of independent offices are included on the nyc.gov web site. They have their own links. Four hundred and ten forms are available. Fifty-five thousand online forms are submitted for use. People are obviously using the system. There are over 250,000,000 hits or page views. It's been ranked number one in usability for city government services and number two in digital governance.
You can contact agency heads. You can contact the mayor. There are 16 comments and feedback forms. Over 730,000 forms are submitted to nyc.gov annually. That's a significant amount of interaction between the citizens and government. And at the bottom, it provides easy access to the performance data in many different formats.
311 is a great base. It's taking 46,000 calls a weekday. To date, over 35 million calls have been made to 311. You can request information. You can ask easy questions. You can make a recommendation. You can also say, "I just passed a pothole" and that information goes directly into the system.
The average call waiting time is 15 seconds. Eighty eight percent of the calls are picked up within 30 seconds.
Now that begs the next question: Are we just seeing how quickly the call is picked up, or are we looking at the quality of it. Is there follow-up? Are you getting the right answer?
In terms of citizen surveys, we don't have a citywide strategy, but different agencies are doing different things. Our Department of Buildings has focus groups in each field office. The Department of Finance has a huge amount of customer survey data as does the Department of Parks. The Human Resources Administration has ongoing surveys in their walk-in centers: "Do you feel you got what you needed while you're here?" The Department of Aging has a senior advisory council.
Once you collect the data, once you go after what the citizens want, how do you turn that into producing results.
You can do it by holding agency and managers accountable for collecting this data. If they collect it, at least they have the information. That's the obvious first step.
Then you need to present it to the public. And you need to always refocus and always try to get a new sense of what people want.
Jeffrey Kay is director of the New York City Mayor's Office of OperationsÂ
Taking the Public Pulse |
Government officials, management experts, and program analysts agree that government services must be customer driven and results-oriented. Governments should pay attention to residents' perceptions and assessments of the quality of the services they receive. “The best way to encourage good performance is to measure it, and the best indicator of government performance is citizen satisfaction,” according to the International City and County Management Association
Hundreds of municipalities, including Phoenix, Miami-Dade County, Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin, San Jose, and Portland, Oregon, use resident surveys to evaluate the quality of services.
Resident surveys provide a unique perspective on municipal services that is not available from other sources. In particular, resident surveys can provide information on:
• constituents' satisfaction with the quality of specific services;
• facts on who uses – and does not use –various services, including how often people use the services and how to use them;
• the reasons specific services are disliked or not used
• high priority but inadequate services;
• potential demands for new services;
• residents' evaluation of and support for policy or service delivery options.
Resident surveys concentrate on the outcomes or results of government services – how satisfied people are with their schools and parks, how safe they feel in their neighborhoods. On the other hand, administrative measures including those found in New York City's Mayor's Management Report focus on inputs (money, staff), effort, and sometimes outputs (tons of trash collected, number of potholes filled). While these are important, what the public wants from government centers on results.
Furthermore, resident surveys allow for the analysis of individual differences in how people use and experience city services – for example, differences by race, ethnicity, age, and gender. In a city as diverse and dynamic as New York, such differences in how people experience government services are significant.
The city's 311 program provides much valuable data to managers and policy-makers as well as the city's diverse stakeholders. But 311 data are not outcome measures. And users of 311 are not representative of New York City residents generally. Callers self-select, violating the cardinal rule of survey research that calls for a random sample.
Interestingly, callers to 311 may not be the most disgruntled New Yorkers. In fact, most dissatisfied customers don't complain -- they just take their business elsewhere. In the public sector, the dissatisfied citizens may simply stop trusting government or move someplace else.
And what about the things New Yorkers like about their government – do people call 311 to pay the city compliments? Probably not. A citizen survey would help capture positive views and document areas where New York City government should keep up the good work.
Moreover, calls to 311 are motivated by a need for information or services, not to provide feedback. The system in no way enquires about residents' awareness, use and assessment of services, nor does it provide data on the demographic or socioeconomic characteristics of its users.
Noise complaints offer an example of how such information might be misused to diagnose where service problems exist. A map of noise complaint calls made to the city's quality of life line in fiscal year 2001 found more complaints from Staten Island's community boards than from all of the Bronx -- a borough three times Staten Island's size. As one Bronx community board member stated at the time, "The only reason why the number of [noise] complaints may not be as high is that many of the people in our community don't trust the system. And they don't believe that they are going to get results.”
Douglas Muzzio is a professor of public policy at Baruch College Â
Taking the Public Pulse |
From having worked inside government, I know there is a tendency to look at all the steps that take you from the beginning to the end, but not always at how consumers view what you do.
We already have methods to find out how consumer view what government does. There's voting. Another is 311, which provides us with a lot of information and a new way for citizens to be involved. And of course, there are citizen surveys.
Can surveys provide citizen input into broad strategic planning efforts and goal setting? Can the public help figure out what our goals are? What are we trying to accomplish as a city? What are our priorities?
There are different types of surveys. In the general citizen survey, you ask a statistically significant group of citizens what they think. User surveys, taken immediately after a citizen has used a service, ask what his or her experience was. With audience specific surveys, you try to understand how a particular community reacts to and appreciates a service.
Some places use independent pollsters to conduct the surveys. Sometimes city auditors or comptrollers do this. They can do this work by mail or by telephone. The information obtained may then be or may be included in a performance document, the equivalent of the New York City Mayor's Management Report.
Let's take a look at the kind of information we would have if we were to ask citizens what they think. Consider water. In New York, we have material such as notices of violations and warnings issued in the watershed, patrol hours for the police and water protection staff, whether waste treatment plants are meeting federal standards. Obviously these things should be measured, but they are not outcome oriented. In Austin, they ask, "Are you satisfied with your home's water pressure?"
In the section of the Mayor's Management Report on parks, you see parks rated exceptional for overall conditions, playground safety, drinking fountains, trees pruned. Other cities ask citizens, "What is your satisfaction with appearance of parks in your neighborhood," "How often are you there?"
And cultural affairs: The Mayor's Management Report lists payments made to the cultural institutions group and new capital projects initiated. But from the citizens' perspective you could have questions about overall satisfaction with cultural arts programs and whether people feel the city supports a diverse range of cultural programs.
Obviously, 311 was not founded as a citizens survey. It was founded to give citizens an easier interface with government. It is hard to argue that it hasn't, in many ways, been a success. Clearly it makes it easy for citizens to access city government. It improves the way they interact with government; they no longer have to call 27 numbers to figure out which agency or bureau handles a specific thing. And there is a lot of information that allows management to understand what is going on.
But does it also function as an indicator of how citizens feel about their government? It is representative of who picks up the phone – not necessarily of the broader population. And it's very hard to infer from it how people feel generally, about services.
So New York should think about how to add citizens as part of its performance management. Some kind of measure beyond 311, that reflects where the citizens are at, ought to be included in New York City's reporting.
Diana Fortuna is president of the www.cbcny.org Citizens Budget Commission
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