Citistat FAIL

After spending some time going through the Six Sigma reports on the Erie County website, I thought I’d take a spin over to the other paragon of governmental FAIL, The City of Buffalo.  I thought I might take a peek at the Citistat meetings and comb through some of the reports to see what progress was coming from the process reporting.  After all, Citistat is kind of like Six Sigma, just without the procedural elements and no definitive measurement methodology.

First of all, why does the City of Buffalo post the videos of their Citistat meetings only in Microsoft Windows Media Player format?  I own a Mac and don’t have a Windows Media Player on my desktop.  I also own a Solaris laptop and a Linux desktop.  None of these computers are equipped to play the videos.  Why not an open format?  Or, hey, why not upload the videos to a video sharing website so they can absorb the bandwidth costs and the city can expand interaction with the local citizenry?

Secondly, after paging through the reports, I’m not exactly certain what the value of Citistat actually is.  It seems like each department head is reporting on activity on a sporadic basis and the detail in the reports is a bit wanting.  Let’s take the report from the Buffalo Sewer Authority in June of 2005 as an example.  Most of the presentation is dedicated to a description of how the sewer system works.  The rest of the presentation is filled with ambiguous deadlines for project completion without any valuable information in regards to cost, process mapping, internal procedures, or hints about how the Sewer Authority is looking to reduce costs or perform their required tasks in a more expedient manner.

If this program is designed to simply document what each department does without any critical analysis, I give it an A+.  If, however, Citistat is designed to be a process improvement program that documents workflow and identifies areas for improvement and cost savings, I’m not really seeing it.  I’ve gone through the reports from the Buffalo Police Department, Fire Department, Sewer Authority, and other organizations and what I see is a public relations effort to demonstrate that this Mayor means business.  What that business is, I don’t know.

I’ll be making some calls to City Hall over the next couple of days to get some more information about Citistat and what benefits the City feels it has gleaned from the effort, but I’m not holding my breath for any revealing tidbits of information.  We assigned Jon Splett to write an article on Citistat last year and he was rebuffed by every official he spoke with, which is generally how it goes with the Brown Administration.