TROY — iDashboards, a pioneer in developing business intelligence dashboard solutions, has teamed up with the city of Oak Park to survey and track specific performance indicators for the city’s parks and recreational offerings and provide an objective and quantifiable way in which to see successes and areas in need of improvement.
The park district serves the recreational needs of the 52,000 residents of the city, providing nearly 3,000 recreation programs and special events annually. Overseen by a board, the district owns an Administrative Center, two outdoor pools, an indoor year-round ice rink, the Oak Park Conservatory, Cheney Mansion, Pleasant Home, a gymnastics and recreation center, seven recreation centers plus 13 parks totaling 84 acres of parkland.
“Before we integrated iDashboards, we were spending a lot of time manually collecting data with no way to turn those numbers into something measurable,” says Bobbi Nance, the park district’s project manager. “The dashboard has been an exceptional tool for us, and it allows me to focus on how we can apply the results. The insight that it has given us has been critical in streamlining our processes and becoming more efficient in our day-to-day tasks.”
The park district has been using the dashboard to survey and track specific performance indicators centered on the park district’s mission and strategic initiatives, such as finances, employee evaluation, infrastructure maintenance and improvement, customer satisfaction, and overall organization. For instance, the city was able to see that park pass sales increased by more than $4,000 from 2013 to 2014.
After a year of using the dashboard internally and seeing the value of the results, the dashboard was released to the public earlier this year.
For more information on the dashboard results for park district of Oak Park, visit pdop.org/about/performance/mission/.
