20 August 2007

THE City of Cape Town's new, enhanced information technology (IT) system will make information about departments' performance readily accessible to the administrative and political leadership.

The system, known as the Performance Management Dashboard, will also shorten residents' interactions with the City, and ensure that these interactions are more accurate and more efficient.

"The dashboard will see to it that we are doing the right things, in the right way," said Executive Mayor Helen Zille in introducing the system on 16 August.

Important trends, failures of performance - and successes - are not always easy to identify or anticipate, because of the amount of data generated by City departments, she noted.

The dashboard will allow the City's decision makers to assess service delivery at a glance, and take appropriate action more quickly, she explained. "It's a mechanism to tell me - and all the City's managers - what is not moving forward when I thought it was!"

Because the dashboard translates reams of complex information into a manageable and unified picture of service delivery, City officials will be able to spend more time acting on data than on collating it.

During the next phase of the City's IT enhancement, the IT systems will be spatially enabled; in other words, data will be visible in map or aerial photography format. For example, when residents telephone the City to report a burst water pipe, or an overflowing stormwater drain, the call centre operators will be able to view the exact location of the pipe or drain - and send out a team to fix the problem.

Such a spatially enabled system will assist officials and workers as they try to co-ordinate delivery efforts in a big city, said councillor Belinda Walker, Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services and Human Resources.

In a small town, officials know where their roads or electricity teams are - sometimes simply by looking out of the window, she said. "This new system will be the big city version of 'looking out of the window', and better enable us all to co-ordinate service delivery in this massive organisation of ours."

Source: capetown.gov.za