ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, a growing number of popular news reports have highlighted how public sector agencies are using data for finding innovative approaches to efficient service delivery around a broad range of issues from emergency management to crime reduction to even mortgage foreclose alleviation 1 . The increased focus on, and potential promise of, data stems from the fact that the volume and variety of information collected by the public sector has significantly grown. Public agencies have many more opportunities to access data, that may not have existed before or was not considered “intelligence” on constituents, with the expansion on of e-governmental practices designed to facilitate transactional relationships and broader use of information and communication technologies (ITCs) by the general public itself (see for example Chun, Shulman, Sandoval & Hovy 2010; Evans-Cowley 2010). One unique and relatively new source of public sector data comes from centralized citizen service request intake systems (i.e. 311-systems), which were first adopted by local governments beginning in the 1990s. The original purpose of the 311-system was to provide better service delivery to constituents by providing unique tracking numbers so requests could be used to hold government responsible. The City of Baltimore was first in the nation to adopt a centralized 311-system in 1996; according to a 2007 report by the International City/County Management Association, an estimated 15 percent of cities over 30,000 people had such a system in place by the end of the first decade (Moulder, 2008). The City of Baltimore became even more notable as the first local government to incorporate the use of data from the 311-system to establish a public agency performance measures in a system called CitiStat, where city agencies were held directly accountable for their responsiveness to citizen requests (Bens, 2005; Behn, 2006).
