Welcome to
CitiStat Buffalo
where open data becomes insight
Welcome to the new CitiStat Buffalo! Click on any of the dashboards below to learn more about how the City of Buffalo's departments, programs, and services are performing.
CitiStat Buffalo Dashboards
CitiStat Buffalo History & Overview
At the beginning of his 2005 mayoral campaign, candidate Byron Brown announced one of the top priorities of his mayoral administration would be ensuring greater accountability and efficiency in the management and delivery of city services to the residents of Buffalo. After his election, Mayor Brown identified CitiStat, a management tracking initiative, as the best system to meet that goal.
CitiStat was founded in Baltimore, Maryland and based off of NYPD's CompStat program. To gain a better understanding of CitiStat and to see firsthand how the system works, Mayor Brown led a fact-finding trip to Baltimore in early March 2006 where he met with then-Baltimore-Mayor Martin O’Malley and key senior staff directly involved with the day-to-day oversight and management of CitiStat.
Upon returning to Buffalo, Mayor Brown directed his staff to work to implement the management tracking initiative which came on-line six months into his tenure as the 58th Mayor of the City of Buffalo.
CitiStat 1.0
In the past, City of Buffalo department or division heads came to a CitiStat Buffalo meeting weekly and appeared before the CitiStat Buffalo Review Panel. Prior to each meeting, the specific department or division would be required to submit data to the CitiStat Buffalo team of analysts, covering a broad range of information.
After the data was received, the CitiStat Buffalo team would analyze the information and prepare a presentation for the meeting. Using GIS mapping and quantitative charts, the analysts for CitiStat Buffalo provide pinpointed information to the review panel detailing where services are being provided (or not) throughout the city.
CitiStat 2.0
Accurate, timely, and reliable information is critical to the success of the CitiStat Buffalo process. Through the old process of submitting data through shared folders, e-mails, or USB flash drives, data submitted to the CitiStat Buffalo team quickly became outdated and stale. Now, utilizing Open Data Buffalo, the City's new open data portal, these datasets are automated, uploaded, and publicly available on one central, easily accessible website. All data are machine-readable, which means that (in addition to being useful for application developers) every dataset is also easily turned into interactive charts, graphs, and maps that provide greater context to how each and every City department is performing. And because these visualizations are linked to the underlying data, any change in the dataset changes the visualizations that are drawing from that data. This gives the Administration (and the public) access to constantly updated data that can generate new insights and drive the increased efficiency and effectiveness of city service delivery.
For example, the chart to the right shows the number of 311 service requests in the City of Buffalo by month from 2008 to present. As new requests are submitted, the number for the most recent month will automatically adjust daily. Anyone viewing this chart will always have up-to-date information. Likewise, any chart on CitiStat Buffalo or Open Data Buffalo will automatically update based on new data continuously uploading to the portal.