Ma: The concern is always there. The good thing is that the county has recognized this special talent, and we are more aware of the market forces. So we adjust our employees' pay to be more or less aware of the market, and we can never, on the public sector side, compete with private sector pay. But from day one we selected team members with this in mind also.

We want folks to enjoy public kind of work schedules, and we do treat them differently because of their special skills. We've done something on the organization side to give them enough reasons to stay. But if the personal reason is there to leave the county to pursue private sector employment, I don't believe there is anything anybody can do to stop them. The real success is that we train the employee and the employee in turn gives Sedgwick County good services and we made a successful project happen. In the long run, will everybody stay with us after they learn all those cool skills? I don't know, it's hard to tell.

Reed: Those bumps in pay, were they made as part of the base salary or was it like a hot skills bonus?

Ma: It's a big salary, it's permanent. Basically they're above the rest of the crowd.

Reed: Interesting. All right, so now we're moving into the other results. Obviously part of the result is saving on the consulting and that's a really great part of the story. But then we have the KPIs. There were more than 800 of them created. So we have a few different results.

One of the beneficial results of that is what you could call increased transparency. So, the taxpayer can go onto the web site and see some of this stuff so there's a benefit there. And then there's a benefit in terms of how these KPIs are measured and improved upon. Maybe you could talk a little bit about these other benefits to come out of this project.

Ma: A few weeks ago our fire chief started talking about the "room of origin" measure. I don't know if you're familiar with that. In the fire industry a key indicator is the percentage of fires you kept in the original place where they started. And our fire district is a rural district. Originally we just used a single measure to show room of origin. As a rural department, we're responsible for a much wider area than the typical urban fire district, so the percentage they keep the fire in the room of origin is a lot lower than an urban department. That created some misunderstanding.

People tend to draw a conclusion that the Sedgwick County Fire Department is less professional than some urban city departments. And that's not the case at all. To make that message more meaningful, to better educate the taxpayers, we decided to introduce two more measures. One is the floor of origin, the other one is the whole structure.

If it's a total loss, we wanted to show that separately to indicate the difficulties of fighting fires in rural areas, a very wide area with a limited number of fire trucks. That has changed; that's basically a reflection that we started managing, using those kinds of indicators. We also added a new EMS crew in 2007, and people already started asking when that was going to show up on the indicators, when we were going to make a difference.

And as we learned, we realized, now that we have this kind of information, one crew will not make a big difference on the key indicator. It's going to take two or three or even more to make a substantial change to the key indicator so taxpayers can appreciate it. And that really drives the budget team practice and the resource allocation decisions at a different level.

Now that we have this information, we know that if we have extra money to enhance EMS services, don't just give them one crew. When you have enough money to give them four or five crew members, do it; otherwise, nobody will know there's any difference. So this enhances the decision-making quality.

Reed: All these indicators are available on the web site, is that right?

Ma: Yes, for now, they are for the management team; we have not released them to the taxpayers yet. We are on the final two or three weeks, then it will be time to review them internally. Then there will be some adjustments here and there on clarity of message, and on the thresholds to make sure they are meaningful. Then we'll show it to the rest of the county employees, county staff, and then whenever the elected officials say we're ready, we'll take this to the general web site and let everybody know it's there.

Reed: Eventually these will probably be public if the officials go along with that.

Ma: I'm pretty sure as soon as we say we're ready, the elected officials will like it.

Reed: But now the public gets some of this information probably based on reports that are generated. Reports are occasionally issued on this stuff and then they see what the results are?

Ma: Yes. When we first demoed this to the commissioners, to the elected officials, their initial question was, How much of that data is manually input? How much of that data is directed from systems without the touch of a human hand?

And that's a critical question, that's very important. The implication of that: if it's a report put together by the department head, I will not trust that as much as if it's a direct extraction from their system. Then I know they won't really have a chance to manipulate the data. It's raw data that's feeding the frame, the indicator.

Reed: That makes a lot of sense. I think I'm still struck by the willingness of the employees involved to have themselves measured so publicly. In private companies - or maybe it's true with your team as well - I can see more of an incentive because it's like, "Well, we'll tie your bonus structure to this whole thing so you perform better." Do you guys take a similar approach? Is it like rewarding performance or is it more that people are on board because they have the public good in mind and they know if they can improve ambulance response times or something that they're helping people? Is that the motivator?

Ma: It's both. When I initially approached everybody about this, I assured all the department heads that on the one hand the public has the right to know. Also in today's world you also have a professional obligation to show how successful you are. Absent of those kinds of active displays of your management information, you are subject to other people's opinions. By having a dashboard in place you are actively getting the truth out.

Actually everybody was okay getting the truth out. If it's the truth, they're okay. It doesn't really matter how many people know. If it's true, then they can get the fair thing out. So in my first run of the demo with the department heads, we had talked about this KPI, this dashboard thing, for several months, but nobody had seen a real one. But let me now show you what yours would look like. When they first saw that they would say, "This is pretty good. I don't have to defend my position on a regular basis anymore. And this dashboard is speaking for me. It's speaking on my behalf. As long as it's showing the truth then I'm okay with it."

And it's more difficult for other people to say your department is less important, because once the truth is out it's very difficult for somebody to attach less importance to it. And that approach, and also my prior position being the Budget Director, I believe played some role.

Once I changed my title and we were talking about people's missions, how they manage, how they make sure they deliver the results the taxpayers want and demand - I was asking those kinds of questions as an ERP director, and back in everybody's mind they were not really viewing me as the ERP director, as the technical project manager. They were still remembering those days I functioned as the budget director and we talked about resource allocation deficiency.

That played some role also, kind of eased into this kind of position. If you have a techie asking those kinds of questions, I don't believe it's going to happen. You don't have that kind of connection with all the department heads. I do believe I benefited immensely from my prior job in working with everybody along those lines.

Reed: And if a response team, for example, improves their KPIs is the incentive for them simply the sort of recognition that they have done so, or is there any kind of pay for performance tied into that too?

Ma: It's pay for performance, it's the expectation actually for the Field Direct Report. And most of the primary indicators are already assigned to the specific person. It's on their annual evaluation. So that's why this whole culture, everything fits together very nicely, and it feels like this dashboard project is just another natural progression based on all the stuff we've done in the past 15 years.

Reed: Absolutely. It's almost like technology finally caught up with you. Which is kind of interesting, something we've seen a lot of in SAP the last two years, that there's been talk of these kinds of things since really the mid to late 90s, but the technology is finally arriving where they're really finally doable. And it's kind of neat to see them come into play. Especially serving the public good like that, too. It's pretty cool that a public sector project would be doing such innovative stuff.

Having said that and knowing that there is this eventual push to put these KPIs online, I guess my final question for you about this stuff is what's next. You seem like the kind of guy that wants a fresh challenge. So what's next for you?

Ma: So far what you've looked at, that's only everybody that reports directly to the county's CEO. There is another portion of Sedgwick County operations that we have not implemented those KPIs on. That's the appointed officials and elected officials, like the sheriff, the DA, the district court, the tax assessor's area. Those folks don't work directly for the county manager. They are next.

Eventually we will have a consolidated county-wide approach, and there is a reason we picked everybody who was working directly for the county manager, because there's one person there and the county manager can fire all of them. So there is some leverage, some position power. We didn't have to resort to that. Once we have these expectations set up, it will be much easier to work with appointed officials, elected officials, where the county manager has less leverage over them.

But we already have the taxpayer expectation set up. Those models are already in place, and they just have to come up with their own to try to measure up to what's already there. The standards are set, all the structures are set.

Reed: So do you see yourself getting involved in that?

Ma: Absolutely. And the other portion would be to start beefing up the reports. All the detail information, different kinds of reports people need - now we have this overall dashboard to set the information tone. Then we just need to enable the more detailed reports. When you drill down within the dashboard, does it answer all the questions people may want to see on real queries? A more detailed listing of information, that's something we need to work on. So more people can get real-life information.

Also automation of data acquisition, that's something we need to continue to improve. Wherever we have systems capturing original transaction information, we just need to set SAP up to do direct extraction.

Reed: It makes me wonder too, down the road a little bit, if the SAP Business Objects integration won't eventually yield some interesting stuff for you guys too, as far as enhanced reporting and management.

Ma: Yes. I started paying more attention to the BO-related stuff. And as part of this project, the foundation, BW back end, the ETL data modeling all the way to the query level, that's the foundation that we know we will continue to rely on. The front end of the tool we use, which is SEM presenting on Portal, it's getting the job done using the provided structure, but we wish we had more flexibility. We wish the end users could influence the presentation in a more significant way. It looks like BO is going to offer that approach.

Once they have their necessary work done connecting BO in a major way with BW back end, I think we need to start evaluating that and take the dashboard to a much higher level. There are already heavy duty users who want a lot more context. They say, "How about letting me design the whole thing? I want to type in a few key words in a search-based dashboard system instead of presenting this in a pre-determined fashion. I just want to see a field. Let me design that, influence the presentation of that, and attach some information from the reports I need." That's what BO will offer.

Reed: Definitely. I guess they've been working hard on the integration. I was just listening to some discussion: they basically have 1,000 people working on it, 500 from the Business Objects side and 500 from the SAP side.

Ma: I get encouraged that the BO started their business model by asking the end user what report they needed, in what form. They said, "Let me make it happen for you. Whether it's already in BW or whether I need to go all the way to the R/3 tables, let me go get it for you and put it in a format you like."

Reed: They're supposed to be best in the industry as far as gathering disparate data and presenting it in the most flexible way possible and the most appealing way. I'll bet that will be down the horizon for you, that will be cool.

Ma: So far what I find lacking is BO's ability to manipulate and model and normalize a large quantity of data on its own. It can do it in a pre-calculated fashion: run a report, save it in a file, and then retrieve that information and meet individual needs in a very limited way. But it doesn't have the equivalent of a business data warehouse where you can have all kinds of data in there stored consistently and present the information in the way you need. So some kind of good connection between BO and BW is necessary. I don't know when they can come up with a good connection.

Reed: Well, they seem to fit together nicely that way, so they just have to figure out the integration, because that's one piece that SAP kind of has. Interesting. Something to keep an eye on then. Well that's great. Ma, I appreciate your time, and it will be great to share this information with our JonERP.com readers.

Ma: Thanks for featuring our project - I enjoyed the discussion.

For more on Ma's project, read Jon Reed's SAPtips article, "Who Said SAP Was Expensive?"