Making Government and Daily Operations More Efficient in Suffolk County By Steve Bellone Suffolk County Executive
O
perating a smart and efficient government has been among the top priorities of my administration since I became Suffolk County Executive. Through measures taken over the past six years to improve our overall finances, we have saved $100 million annually and reduced the size of government by almost 10,000 positions. Suffolk County is home to over 1.5 million residents. Our government functions on a $3 billion budget, with a work force of almost 10,000 employees and more than 50 departments. Not only are we one of the largest counties in the state, but we have a larger population than 11 states in the country. In order to make judicious decisions about investments, cuts, programs and planning I have invested in a Performance Management team and program whose mission is to reform how we do business in a data-driven, innovative manner. The Suffolk County Division of Performance Management is tasked with making our county government more efficient through a variety of initiatives, including training and implementing continuous improvement projects, providing employees with the necessary technology tools in order to make smart, wellinformed and strategic decisions and working county-wide on creating a culture of innovation. County Executives face difficult decisions about meeting critical demands, addressing issues of sustainability and figuring out what services need to be enhanced – all which require key data that has never previously been available or even existed in Suffolk County-until now. The Performance Management Team has worked in with the Department of Technology to develop the innovative SuffolkSTAT program through web-based software that is designed to provide our department managers with real-time dashboards of the key performance information in order to evaluate and make informed management decisions. Trend analysis, corrective action efforts and strategic planning are now happening in ways never before possible. SuffolkSTAT will assist our departments in making budget decisions for capital programming, operations, staffing, overtime, purchases and more. We are using SuffolkSTAT in several departments already, specifically with the departments that make up a majority of our operating budget – including the Police Department, Public Works, Health and Social Services – to identify key performance indicators that align with the County’s broad goals and overall mission, prioritize key information, track performance and create corrective action plans to address areas of weakness. Remarkably, we were able to develop the SuffolkSTAT
26 N YSAC News Summer 201 7
program internally by collaborating with the Department of Information Technology – saving our residents an additional $1 million. Armed with critical performance data and a culture of continuous improvement, we are advancing goals that matter to Suffolk County residents, such as improving the state of our water quality, enhancing economic development initiatives, building upon public health and public safety initiatives, providing an efficient transportation system and operating a smart county government. While we certainly have more work to do and while there are many initiatives that my Performance Management team is working on, we are proud to be making significant progress to overhaul our government for the better on behalf of our taxpayers and to continue making Suffolk County a great place to live.