Mayor’s Operations Innovation Team First Year Update
Written by Mark Thomas, the Director of the Mayor’s Operations Innovation Team
In July, the Mayor’s Operations Innovation Team will celebrate our official one-year marker. We are grateful for your philanthropic investment and assistance in developing the right courses of action to reform City Hall. This year, we’ve focused our time understanding the dispersed operations, defining success within the scope of best practices, and secure budgetary, legislative, and department-level support to deliver sustainable impact.
Our team has many early wins: redesigning and relaunching BAVN (the City’s procurement storefront), procuring ePropertyPlus (the City’s interim asset management system), helping spearhead the Civic Center Master Plan, redevelopment of Lincoln Heights Jail, and launching the first annual Mayor’s Cup, to promote the City’s openness to innovation and disruptive ideas.
Our work has currently leveraged more than $6 million in investment from the City’s budget, significant pro-bono expertise and consultation, and a quantified reform agenda for the City’s $1.8 billion real estate portfolio, $300 million workers’ compensation and risk management costs, and the City’s annual $8.2 billion procurement spending.
The Mayor’s Office has ensured our reforms are priorities for the General Managers and integrated into the City’s narrative for long-term fiscal reforms. While these may be behind-the-scenes, Back-to-Basics initiatives, our team has presented to White House Science & Technology staff, served on panels at the Code for America Summit, Mayor’s Innovation Project, and Clinton Global Initiative. I will speak at Verge 2016 in Silicon Valley, highlighting technology and innovation within City Hall.
Our team extends beyond City Hall. Columbia, Cornell, Pepperdine, USC, and UCLA have provided academic and student support to supplement our work. The O-Team’s reforms are among the best examples of systematic reform that will improve how the City does business and the perceived willingness to tackle tough, intractable issues.
As we prepare for our second and final-year, I wanted to provide the Coalition an overview of our set outcomes and the focus. Our team will expand, beyond our current size, to ensure we have the legal, change-management, financial, technological acumen to successfully drive the implementation.
I welcome questions and look forward to continuing to drive this meaningful effort.
- Implement department-level reforms to execute the financial, data collection and reporting, and support the Mayor’s risk reduction efforts.
- Provide leadership to build out the City’s technological infrastructure for maintaining risk management data, processes, and incidents.
- Oversee the implementation of predictive analytics tools for workers’ compensation fraud detection and enforcement.
- Develop and implement the City’s first wellness programs, with strategic initiatives to reduce and control injury and health-related costs.
- Support negotiation efforts to expand Alternative Dispute Resolution with the City unions, to reduce litigation and recovery times.
- Partner with Spikes Cavell to conduct spend analysis of $8.2 billion in procurement spending, providing specific recommendations on savings and standardize data, category management, and reporting metrics.
- Re-examine the City’s standard provisions and contractor requirements to cut red tape.
- Establish the City’s Strategic Procurement Office. Harvard University’s Government Performance Lab has committed pro-bono support.
- Provide leadership to build out the City’s Procure-to-Pay technological infrastructure.
- Develop and implement standardize procurement data and category management integrating efforts into the City’s technological and financial management systems.
- Implementing department-level reforms to ensure proper inventory and property management, coordination between the City’s real estate and asset management teams, and the City’s transaction and disposition capacity.
- Provide leadership to oversee the City’s implementation of AssetWorks property management system.
- Ensure financial, data, tenant, and inventory tracking reforms are implemented, while enabling structural reform of the City’s asset management divisions.
- Build out framework to incorporate the Los Angeles Development Fund as tool for project implementation and economic development.
- Support the streamlined disposition of properties for economic development and housing and establish permanent operations for p3, community reinvestment districts, and infrastructure financing.