New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications: Online Tool for Tracking Federal Stimulus Funds

Accenture wins Center for Digital Government’s Best Fit Integrator Award for NYCStat Stimulus Tracker Project.

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) oversees the city's use of existing and emerging technologies in government operations, works to improve the government's efficiency through technology and helps to make communication with the government straightforward and clear.

DoITT and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Operations, which oversees daily operations of city agencies and helps them to improve services and measure performance to provide greater accountability, teamed with Accenture to develop and implement the NYCStat Stimulus Tracker, an online capability to help the city track federal recovery funds.

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) supplies funding to government agencies and departments to support efforts that include modernizing health care, improving schools, upgrading infrastructure and investing in technologies that will lay the foundation for a robust and sustainable 21st century economy.

Stimulus funds allocated to New York City are being used to ensure the continuation of vital city services, provide assistance to New Yorkers in need and stimulate the city’s economy. Federal legislative requirements mandate that government organizations receiving these funds must provide citizens and public officials the ability to track how federal stimulus funds are received and spent. New York City needed to meet this mandate in an aggressive timeframe, soon after funds were first announced in early March 2009.

DoITT called upon Accenture for help in building a sustainable and scalable reporting mechanism to track funding. Accenture established a successful track record with DoITT and the Office of Operations during the design and delivery of the Citywide Performance Reporting system, an interactive dashboard that provides public access to critical performance indicators for the city and tracks the service delivery of more than 40 city agencies, and the NYC 311 Customer Service Center and hotline.

As part of these efforts, Accenture helped the city implement Oracle® Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, a suite of business intelligence tools that are helping New York City executives make more intelligent decisions by providing them with fast and flexible access to information about customers’ demands and agency performance.

Under the pressure of an aggressive deadline, Accenture delivered high performance by quickly moving the city toward achieving the mayor’s—and President Obama’s—goals of improving transparency, accountability and accessibility in government.

Accenture worked with the Mayor’s Office of Operations to efficiently develop and deliver a solution that provides the mandated information and also creates a foundation for sustainable growth of the application. The team was able to accelerate results by leveraging the flexible business intelligence platform previously implemented to support Citywide Performance Reporting.

In just six weeks, Accenture helped build NYCStat Stimulus Tracker. This best-in-class reporting mechanism enables the public to follow stimulus funding progress at project, contract and payment levels and ties public outcomes to money spent. The solution also includes geographic information systems (GIS) technologies that provide a mapping component, thereby enabling citizens to view the work happening in their area of the city.

Specifically, NYCStat Stimulus Tracker looks at the city’s use of stimulus funding in eight areas:

• Infrastructure
• Energy efficiency
• Economic and workforce development
• Health and social services
• Education
• Public safety
• Neighborhood stabilization
• Budget relief

The groundbreaking NYCStat Stimulus Tracker puts New York City at the forefront of cities complying with federal legislative requirements and can serve as a model for other cities and states.

One of the first reporting solutions in the market, NYCStat Stimulus Tracker supports better decision making by agency and program leaders and helps interested citizens to:

• See how funding sources are distributed to building projects and other City programs.
  
  
• Track key performance measurements, such as jobs created.
  
  
• Drill down to see details of projects and learn how these projects are helping the city, for example, the start and end dates of construction projects.
  
  
• View an interactive map of certain project and program locations.
  
  
• Help hold city government accountable by easily identifying progress toward program goals.

Accenture’s research into high-performance businesses and governments reveals that governments can deliver public sector value by focusing on transparency, accessibility of information and accountability. NYCStat Stimulus Tracker helps bring New York City closer to achieving these important goals.

Looking forward, Accenture will provide ongoing system support and will regularly deploy enhanced capability via new system releases. Future system improvements will expand the depth of reporting on different categories, enhance the geographic information systems (GIS) capability, and deliver a more comprehensive view on the current allocation and status of spending across the city.

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