Data
Design
Government

New York Mayor’s Office DMMR

New York City Mayor’s Office of Operations (Ops) is a charter that works with City agencies to collect and report data that aid in assessing agency performance. Every year they release the Mayor’s Management Report, made up of hundreds of pages of data from each agency. Ops sought to create a user-friendly platform that would make performance data more accessible and easier to understand for City agencies, elected officials, media, and the general public.

To satisfy the objectives laid out by Ops, the platform needed to be able to handle thousands of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from over 50 agencies, going back more than 20 years.

Challenges

With over 20 years of data from 2500 KPIs of 55+ Agencies, maintaining accuracy was the top priority.
Simplify the experience and design for users to understand the Agencies’ performance metrics.
Implement and pass the latest data security standards and policies set forth by NYC.

Simplified User Experience

The Mayor’s Management Report is composed of hundreds of pages of data from each agency with descriptions on their achievements, goals and objectives. Transforming the data to be made available online was a task that required mental modeling and a new user interface of following targeted audiences:

New York City Residents
Media and Advocacy Group
Employees of City Agencies
City Council & City Hall Leadership

We analyzed Ops team’s current workflows and gained an understanding of their prospective requirements, features, and user profiles.

We conducted interviews with key stakeholders.
Performed a comparative analysis of similar platforms utilized by other government entities and created a system to assign weighted scores based on relevant features and benefits.

UX and Design

Simplified user experience that would let the audience view, analyze and compare data and download them using online tools.
Story telling component for Leadership and Agencies to convey campaigns and vision for its residents.

Data Analysis and Optimization

7 City Services
Over 25 Years of Data
50+ Participating Agencies
More than 2500 Key Performance Indicators
Standardize the data
Enforce checks for accuracy and data integrity
Advanced caching mechanisms are in place to ensure the speed of the website

Geo-Representation

We implemented the capability in DMMR to represent the geographic characteristic of the KPIs using Choropleth (statistical thematic map). Users are able to view data from different years on the map and understand the performance of an Agency.

Leveraged MapBox for cartography to create the base map
The overlay polygons of boroughs and sub boroughs were consumed from existing open data initiatives available from NYC using ArcGIS layers and services.

Headless Architecture with Security at the Forefront

With the quantity of data that required to be stored as well as represented we implemented the system with the “Headless CMS” architecture to be available to the frontend in the form of REST or GQL API. The advantages include better data import and enrichment support, rapid design iterations and execution, enhanced security, tremendous SEO advantages, simpler deployments, easier third-party integrations.

Support and Maintenance

DMMR is a platform that is evolving with the needs of Agencies, Ops team as well as the data that flows into it. We maintain the infrastructure, code and processes in a timely manner.

DMMR platform evolved to be a comprehensive platform to analyze performance indicators of Agencies that provided transparency, accountability, storytelling and visibility.

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