Michigan Government Performance Dashboard
Dashboard Spy readers know that I’m a big fan of providing government spending transparency by surfacing the data to the public via business intelligence dashboards. I’ve covered most of the government dashboards in use right now and I’m trying to “complete the set” by examining the efforts of each state.
Today, we look at the Michigan State Government Performance Dashboard. It is available at http://michigan.gov/midashboard and here are 2 screenshots. The first one is from an earlier rendition. The second dashboard is the current production performance dashboard.
The story behind these local government dashboards is a very interesting one. The impetus for these dashboards came from Governor Snyder and he used his State of the State speech to introduce and promote the dashboard concept.
The following is an excerpt from an excellent article on the speech titled Peering at Synder’s Dashboard.
The core of the speech was the “Michigan Dashboard,” a website setting out 21 measures of how Michigan is performing on the big-picture subjects: the economy, health and education, quality of life, public safety and “value for government.”
The Dashboard will be updated periodically to give both the public and folks in government an idea of how we stack up against other states — and indicate whether we’re making progress or not
Most importantly, however, it’s a public device to hold public officials accountable for performance. Devices like this are a relatively common business tool, a quick and easy way to see how things are going. The idea is to allow management to focus time and resources on important areas rather than waste energy on largely scattershot approaches.
But when it comes to government, introducing a transparent, updated, publicly available way to judge actual progress — or lack of it –is nothing short of revolutionary. It puts the focus squarely on actual data, benchmarked against other states.
Among other good things, it’ll help eliminate debates in Lansing based on incomplete or inaccurate information, or in many cases, on mere ideology. There is something enormously refreshing about our state’s leading political figure putting a priority on just the facts.
Bottom line: If Snyder wanted to make a qualitative change in the way our state is governed, installing the Michigan Dashboard in the heart of his State of the State speech was a great way to do it.
Snyder didn’t exactly invent this approach but few governors I know of have ever held up such a specific and public mirror by which the public can judge their success. In terms of other such metrics, the Oregon Progress Board has tracked the state’s standing on dozens of quality of life measures for years. and, The Center for Michigan has published since 2008 a “Michigan Scorecard” tracking 29 topics in a similar manner.
No doubt there will be reasonable quibbles about the dashboard’s design. There is little attention paid to the environment. Attendance at state parks is hardly the only good measure of how we’re taking care of our woods and waters. And the value-for-government chart shows Michigan state government operating cost as a percentage of gross state product (the best measure of the size of our economy) without benchmarking it against other states.
But overall, it’s a great step. And it signifies a governor who is interested in how things really are rather than how they might be.
I’ll cover more on this Michigan Dashboard soon.