The Atlanta Dashboard

Introduction
The Atlanta Dashboard is a performance management tool that the City uses to track the effectiveness of City services and to hold our managers accountable for service delivery. Each year the City develops a strategic plan based on input from citizens and other stakeholders. Based on this plan, performance targets are established for all of our operating divisions. The Atlanta Dashboard allows us to track our performance against those targets on an ongoing basis. Mayor Franklin holds weekly meetings with her senior management team to review our progress against those targets and to make operational adjustments if needed.

FAQs

How do I find my way around The Atlanta Dashboard?

The dashboard is organized around the four major strategic goals of the Mayor: A Safe City, a Strong Infrastructure, an Efficient and Effective Government, and a Financially Stable Government.

Within each of the four major strategic goals we have supporting strategies that help us to achieve those goals. The dashboard “cascades” downward through the supporting strategies to the performance measures that tell us whether our strategies are working.

For example, under Safe City, one of our strategies is to reduce crime. To do that, one of our strategies is to respond quickly to emergency calls, which increases our ability to apprehend suspects on the scene. We have set a target for average response time to emergency calls and we are tracking our actual response time each month to determine whether we are meeting that target. In the dashboard, by clicking on the icons you can see how we are doing on that measure (see graphic below)

What do the colors mean?

The dashboard is color coded to help quickly identify problem areas. Boxes that are green indicate that we are on plan. Red means that we are off plan and that we need to “intervene” (that is, do something) if we are to get back on plan. Yellow boxes alert us to measures that are off plan but not to the point where an intervention is yet needed.

You will also notice green or red arrows in some of the boxes. The arrows indicate trends. For example, a red arrow in a green box sends the message that we are on plan for now, but the trend is negative.

Why are we making the dashboard public?

One of Mayor Franklin’s core goals for her administration is to make city government more transparent and accountable to the public. The Atlanta Dashboard helps us to accomplish this by making the performance goals of the city known to everyone and to make our progress against those goals publicly available. Like every organization, we will sometimes succeed in meeting those goals and sometimes we will fail. What is important, however, is that the citizens of Atlanta are aware of what we are trying to accomplish, feel empowered to participate, and work with us to create a better and more effective City government.

A Caveat

Since this is the first time the City of Atlanta has tried to make this type of information available online, we hope you will be patient. The strategies themselves will change overtime as we adopt new approaches to solving the city’s problems; as a result, some measures may be added and some removed over time (although we imagine the vast majority of measures will be permanent). We are also in the process of finalizing our data collection process, so some data may at times be slightly out of date. Our goal is to have data that is no more than six weeks old.

How do I connect to The Atlanta Dashboard?

The Atlanta Dashboard is a web-based software program that anyone with an internet connection can access. Just click here and you will be in!

Why do I get an error message “ Failed to load Scorecard”, when I click on the link?

You probably need a new or updated JVM plug-in. Click here to download the plug-in. Then just click on the Get It Now button in upper right hand corner of the page.