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Memphis, Tennessee, USA

From a Windowless Conference Room to a Mayoral Platform: Memphis Builds Momentum with Data.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Health & Wellness, High-Performing Government, Public Safety, Technology

2019 Silver Certification

This narrative was written for Memphis’ 2019 Silver What Works Cities Certification. Some content may be outdated. For the most current information, please visit memphistn.gov.

At a Glance

The City’s Department of Animal Services used data to track progress toward its goal of ensuring more shelter animals find homes, now nearly 94% of animals are adopted, up from just 46% in 2014.

Dispatched a paramedic and a health doctor in a cherry-red SUV to evaluate callers, bringing the screening exam to the patient to make travel easier through the Rapid Assessment Decision and Redirection (RADAR) data program.

Took a holistic approach to data using video analytics, installing cameras around the city to monitor trash collection, potholes, and a wide range of factors impacting city life.

The Beginning of Data

When it comes to transforming your city into a 21st-century data tech model, is it possible to be both incredibly humble and supremely advanced at the same time?

Memphis proves that it is!

The City is rewriting the rules for what it means to be a smart city on a daily basis. But while Memphis is leading the way, you will never hear a public official — from the mayor down to line-level data analysts — claim that their work is finished.

Momentum Gets Going

The City’s approach to tech and data began in 2011 when Memphis was chosen to be one of the first five cities to receive a Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Team (i-team) grant.

Then-Innovation Director Doug McGowen began leading a small group of creative thinkers to rethink and revamp major policies in areas of gun violence and neighborhood economic vitality. After the initial success of the City’s i-team work, McGowen realized something most all innovation leaders encounter: Individual programs may see dramatic improvements, but the underlying systems and operations of government will not sustain success without a solid performance management system in place. McGowen holed up in a windowless conference room in City Hall while he talked with all city departments to map out a rudimentary performance management program.

Tackling the Basics

Memphis’s Good Government Dashboard may have its roots in the Innovation Office, but leaders knew that the new data system needed to prioritize the basics of service delivery before it could take on glitzier projects, such as mobile apps.

The seriousness of data and performance becomes clear the minute you step into one of the monthly dashboard meetings. Directors from across the City’s departments convene to analyze service delivery numbers displayed on a wide screen for all to see. What’s evident at these meetings is the meticulous attention to the fundamentals of performance.

For example, in 2016 police recruitment had not been keeping pace with attrition, and staffing was at critically low levels. The City revamped its public safety recruitment and retention practices, and Human Resources now reports monthly on officer staffing, attrition, and recruitment. Another instance of data illuminating a service gap has been in the City’s Department of Animal Services, which has been tracking progress toward its goal of ensuring more shelter animals find homes. Now nearly 94% of animals are adopted, up from just 46% in 2014.

A dog recently adopted into its forever home as a result of Memphis’s data use.

Streamlining Emergency Medical Services

Memphis’ focus on data has created a culture in which other agencies have the support to experiment and be creative with how they implement services. Take emergency medical services (EMS), for example. Housed in the Fire Department, they were awash with data and resources but were having a difficult time figuring out if they were effectively dispatching their ambulances. “We would just keep getting more money from the City Council to ensure we were responding quickly to calls, without questioning if we were providing the most appropriate services,” said Fire Chief Gina Sweat.

Sweat dug into the call data and conducted a full review of services, leading to a startling conclusion: Up to 20% of EMS calls did not require an ambulance. Something had to change. Fire Department Lieutenant Kevin Spratlin started researching how Memphis could connect residents to the right services, such as a primary care physician or a healthcare professional, instead of dispatching an ambulance. “These are not people abusing 911 — they just don’t know where to turn” shared Lieutenant Spratlin.

Memphis’ solution to its strained EMS resources comes in the form of a cherry-red SUV.

The City stood up a pilot of what is now its Rapid Assessment Decision and Redirection (RADAR) program, which dispatches a paramedic and a health doctor in a cherry-red SUV to evaluate the caller, bringing the screening exam to the patient. Interim results of that pilot showed that, out of 400 runs, 66% did not require an ambulance.

The program, which is preparing to fully launch this summer, will ensure that all callers to 911 receive the right level of care, promoting better long-term health outcomes while saving money for both residents and the City. In fact, insurance companies are proactively calling Spratlin to see what the cost-saving secret is. “These guys used to never return my call, and now they want to talk to me!” he exclaims.

Beyond Sensors to Service

Maybe one of the greatest innovations is happening in the Information Services department. These are often agencies that serve a back-office function, such as ensuring that computers are in working order. Not at all content with the status quo, Mike Rodriguez — an ex-FedEx tech executive turned City Chief Information Officer — is charting a new path by leading the City’s first open data policy with the ultimate goal being to visualize the entire city. Rodriguez disparages the conventional wisdom that cities should embrace the Internet of Things, with sensors everywhere, and instead is creating “situational awareness,” or clarity of all the factors impacting an event. To do this, the City is installing cameras that will soon provide video analytics for most everything from trash collection to potholes.

Rodriguez explains his approach: “Everyone wants little sensors on everything. For what? Put a sensor on a garbage can, and it may tell you when it’s full, but with video I can tell you a hundred other factors about the trash, the neighborhood, and the surrounding environment — and for less money.” But as with every other official in Memphis, Rodriguez stresses that these efforts are nascent, and there is far more to learn.

As Memphis rewrites the rules, it’s reminding us that momentum starts where you make it — like with the basics, or in a windowless conference room.

Read more about Memphis’s data journey here.

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Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA

Chattanooga’s Data-Driven Mission to End Veteran Homelessness.

Project Type:
Equity, Finance, High Performing Government, Homelessness

At a Glance

Used data to more efficiently and quickly address the veteran housing crisis by understanding the size and scope of the problem, coordinating with city officials, and measuring their impact.

Chattanooga’s Police Data Initiative analyzed arrests, traffic citations, 911 calls, and use of force, and created a Police Equity Dashboard to implement more equitable practices.

Residents can access performance dashboards and keep tabs on everything from infrastructure issues to the average length of traffic jams via open data platform ChattaData.org.

Affordable Housing in Chattanooga

2014 was a decisive year for the city of Chattanooga. Then-Mayor Andy Berke set the ambitious goal of housing all of the city’s homeless veterans by the end of 2016, creating a special task force and signing on to the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness.

“We met that goal by the hair of our chin,” says Tyler Yount, the City’s former director of special projects, who served as head of the mayor’s task force composed of city officials, homeless service providers, community leaders, and veterans.

How did they house every veteran? In Chattanooga, a city of about 180,000 people located along the Tennessee River, the task force took a data-driven approach. First, it canvassed the city to track down every homeless veteran — they found a total of 184 individuals. Next they mapped and analyzed every step involved with housing veterans, looking to streamline and improve the process. Then they began holding weekly meetings with case managers and officials at city agencies that addressed homelessness in order to share and implement ideas. It was an iterative and at times painstaking process, but it moved the needle in the right direction.

Tracking progress toward housing the City’s homeless veterans was supported by a dashboard detailing the status of time-bound, measurable goals. The task force created it in partnership with Chattanooga’s Office of Performance Management and Open Data (OPMOD). The office has been at the center of the City’s years-long commitment, supported by What Works Cities (WWC), to build a data-driven culture that prizes transparency, accountability, and evidence-based evaluations of programs and policies. All this prior investment and work has built a strong foundation for the task force’s success.

The mayor liked the task force’s dashboard so much that he tracked it on his smartphone — which helped the task force stay focused on success. “Having support from the top for our data-driven approach mattered,” Yount says. One major problem the team discovered while sifting through data: Some veterans with housing vouchers had difficulty finding a place to live and signing a lease within the 90 days required by the Chattanooga Housing Authority (CHA). Vouchers would expire after that point, forcing homeless veterans to start the city’s housing assistance process over again. At the task force’s request, the City hired housing navigation assistants to help veterans secure housing. The result: People were able to be housed weeks — even months — faster than they would have without targeted support.

Another successful process improvement involved CHA paperwork. The task force worked with the agency to expedite processing of required paperwork by weeks. “Lots of small tweaks like that saved us three weeks here, five days there,” Yount says. “There was no magic wand — we just had to chip away at the problem and try to make the housing process better and easier for veterans.”

When the task force began its work in Spring 2014, the average time it took to get homeless veterans into housing was close to 300 days. By the end of 2016, it shrank to about 60 days. By then, the city had achieved “functional zero” when it came to homeless veterans. This metric, developed by the national advocacy organization Community Solutions, means the number of veterans experiencing homelessness in Chattanooga is less than the number of veterans it has proven it can house within a month. To reach this milestone, a community must first gather quality data on every homeless veteran and update it at least monthly to ensure that when a veteran does become homeless, the ordeal is brief.

“We would try different solutions and then look at the data that month to see if it got people moving into housing faster.”

Chattanooga Former Director of Special Projects Tyler Yount

Building a City-Wide Learning Culture

The City has scaled up similar data-driven techniques to address homelessness as a whole in Chattanooga while also making data-driven governance and innovation the norm across other realms. OPMOD, which launched in 2014, works to harness data and use specific performance metrics to support projects that can improve the lives of residents in areas like economic growth and public safety.

For example, OPMOD staff has helped with Chattanooga’s Police Data Initiative. The team analyzed arrests, traffic citations, 911 calls, and use of force, and created a Police Equity Dashboard to break down the data. The process revealed that Chattanooga’s nonwhite residents were disproportionately cited for driving without insurance or with an expired registration. The city is now working on how to better help minority populations with vehicle upkeep.

“Our approach to data in the city is very mission-driven. We don’t do data for data’s sake. We’re very purposeful in why and how we use data. And we’ve tried to create a learning culture built around it.”

OPMOD Director of Performance Management & Open Data Tim Moreland
A screenshot from Chattanooga’s open data portal. Image courtesy of the City of Chattanooga.

To that end, Chattanooga began holding monthly data-driven performance meetings called ChattaData in which the heads of city agencies team with OPMOD’s three data experts to crunch numbers and tackle big issues. The City also created an open data platform, ChattaData.org, so that residents can view performance dashboards to keep tabs on everything from property crimes to the average length of traffic jams. (Technical assistance received from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Government Excellence, a WWC expert partner, in part focused on open data practices, including automating the flow of data to the platform to increase access to real-time data and better respond to resident requests.)

Chattanooga also embraced budgeting for outcomes, an approach that involves specifying outcomes the city hopes to achieve through the annual budgetary process, creating plans for how to achieve them, and then using data to measure progress. And in 2017, Chattanooga launched the Peak Academy, which trains city employees to use data to drive innovation. Moreland estimates that about 200 people from various city departments have attended the intensive five-day “black belt” training program, which is based on a successful program in Denver, Colorado. The expectation is that each attendee returns to their regular duties ready to implement three innovation ideas that can improve work processes and the delivery of city services to residents.

Peak Academy graduates. Image courtesy of the City of Chattanooga.

Even small, relatively simple innovations can have big impacts over time, Moreland says, while building “connective tissue between city staff and between staff and residents,” he says.

“That’s one thing that’s really special about Chattanooga and the culture we’ve created around data-driven work in the city. It’s very collaborative, it’s very open, and at heart it’s about service, making the city a better place.”

OPMOD Director of Performance Management & Open Data Tim Moreland

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