Cape Town — The City of Cape Town has introduced a new system that will make information about its departments' performance readily available, so that service delivery can be assessed at a glance.

Introducing the system, Executive Mayor of the City Helen Zille said the Performance Management Dashboard (PMD) "will see to it that we are doing the right things, in the right way."

Mayor Zille noted that the important trends, failures of performance and successes were not always easy to identify or anticipate, because of the amount of data generated by the city's departments.

"The Dashboard will allow the city's decision makers to assess service delivery at a glance, and take appropriate action more quickly.

"It's a mechanism to tell me - and all the city's managers - what is not moving forward when I thought it was," she explained.

The PMD system translates reams of complex information into a manageable and unified picture of service delivery, enabling the city officials to spend more time acting on data than on collating it.

The mayor said during the next phase of the city's IT enhancement, the systems will be spatially enabled.

In other words, she explained, data will be visible in map or aerial photography format.

"For example, when residents telephone the city to report a burst water pipe, or an overflowing storm water drain, the call centre operators will be able to view the exact location of the pipe or drain - and send out a team to fix the problem," she said.

Commenting on the new system Belinda Walker, Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services and Human Resources, said such a spatially enabled system will assist officials and workers as they try to co-ordinate delivery efforts in a big city.

"This new system will be the big city version of 'looking out of the window', and better enable us all to co-ordinate service delivery in this massive organisation of ours."