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City Manager Christopher McGuire has proposed that Altoona hire a consulting firm to create an interactive scorecard that would track the city's progress in putting its new comprehensive plan into practice.
Envisio would provide a "strategy software platform" that hundreds of government, education and nonprofit organizations have used to manage their strategic plans, according to a company website.
The program would furnish a "road map" to show how far the city has advanced toward accomplishing various goals established by the "subsections" of the comp plan, which is entitled All Together Altoona, McGuire told City Council at a recent meeting.
The efforts would be expressed in terms of percentages in "real time," he said.
"It's a metric to measure ourselves," McGuire said. "What gets measured gets done."
It would help ensure against the plan being left "on a shelf," according to McGuire.
The company would provide a dashboard summarizing the data that would be linked to the city's webpages, according to McGuire.
Envisio has done such work with the city of Irving, Texas, said McGuire, who came to Altoona near the end of last year after working for the city of Clyde, Texas.
The cost would be about $23,000, according to McGuire.
It would require a contract with the firm that would need to be approved by councilmembers.
The Envisio program helps organizations get tasks assigned "to the right people" and helps them stay "focused on what matters," according to an Envisio webpage.
The program is "customizable," with progress reports that can be automated and also provided on-demand, according to the webpage.
The program has helped Irving employees report on strategic planning progress with far less effort than the "painful" measures required before Envisio was hired, according to an Irving city administrator who was quoted on an Envisio webpage.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.