How Many City Departments Does it Take to Remove a Dead Animal?
The Price of Government, by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson, is an attempt to reshape management practices in government. Along the way, they tell some interesting tales of the way things were, or in many cases, still are. For example, they discuss CitiStat, a data-collection and mining program used to evaluate the performance of government departments. Simply by gathering information into one place for top officials to review, it can be a useful tool by revealing duplication of effort. “CitiState … revealed that four different agencies had responsibility for dead animals, depending on the type, location, and time of day. After discussion, city leaders consolidated the responsibility in the Department of Public Health.
