Miami-Dade County: Becoming a Results-Oriented Government with ActiveStrategy Enterprise

Executive Summary
Miami-Dade County, located in Southern Florida, is home to an extremely diverse population of 2.4 million residents. Because many areas of the sprawling county are unincorporated, its government must provide a wider range of services to many of its residents than most counties do. With budgets in excess of $7 billion and nearly 30,000 employees in 60 departments and offices, managing and governing this diverse and changing county is no small proposition, which makes the progress they've made to date all the more impressive.

In 2004, Miami-Dade County's leadership recognized that it needed a way to more efficiently communicate its most important objectives, to effectively review performance across the breadth and depth of the organization, and to improve outcomes. To address the need for improved alignment, visibility, and scalability, Miami-Dade County began searching for a powerful, connected solution.

“There were two important reasons why we chose to work with ActiveStrategy. The first was how quickly we became comfortable with the expertise and experience of the ActiveStrategy team and the second was that the look and feel of their product was extremely consistent with our strategic management framework. It seemed like it had been built to do exactly what we needed it to do,” commented Ray Scher, the Assistant Director for Miami-Dade County's Office of Strategic Business Management.

Since implementing ActiveStrategy Enterprise (ASE) and working closely with the ActiveStrategy strategic management consulting team, the county has achieved tremendous alignment to their strategic plan, improved visibility into performance, and achieved significantly better business outcomes. In fact, Miami-Dade County was named the Overall Performance Management award winner by The Performance Institute and The Council for Excellence in Government in 2007. The county's Park and Recreation Department was also a recipient of the 2009 Florida Sterling Award, which is a program based upon the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program.

And, in what is the county's most important benchmark of success – overall citizen satisfaction – the government has seen a 10 percent rise over the past three years. What makes this even more striking is that in the same time period, the U.S. average has declined by six percentage points.