performance

Santiago Garces

Ref Batch
B
Focus Area(s)
Ref Batch Number
6
Country of Reform
Interviewers
Tristan Dreisbach
Name
Santiago Garces
Interviewee's Position
Chief Innovation Officer,
Interviewee's Organization
Office of Innovation, South Bend, Indiana
Language
English
Town/City
South Bend, Indiana
Country
Date of Interview
Reform Profile
No
Abstract

In this interview, South Bend, Indiana Chief Innovation Officer Santiago Garces discusses the creation of the innovation and technology unit within South Bend’s city government. Garces recounts the path that took him from Bogota, Colombia to Indiana.  He discusses early projects to identify areas in which government could operate more efficiently and effectively, as well as the evolution of a small innovation office into a full-fledged department. Garces talks about creating a business analytics team, consolidating the city’s information technology (IT) services into one office, and making IT more efficient by outsourcing some services and moving to the cloud. He also explains how his team managed resistance to change and shares some lessons learned for other municipalities interested in creating innovation units.

Santiago Garces video clips: 

Business Mapping 

 

The Hardest Parts of the Exercise

 

 

 

Profile

Santiago “Santi” Garces was born and raised in Colombia. In 2006, he came to the United States to attend at the University of Notre Dame, where he studied electrical engineering and political science. He earned his undergraduate degree in 2011 and stayed at Notre Dame for a one-year master’s program in entrepreneurship in science, engineering, and technology. After graduating, he and a group of classmates worked with civic and business leaders in South Bend to start a nonprofit organization called EnFocus, which funded fellowships allowing young graduates to work on innovation projects in South Bend. Garces spent part of his fellowship working with city government. In August 2013, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg offered him a job as innovation and performance manager. In January 2015, he became the city’s first chief innovation officer. 

Rebooting a Rust Belt City: An Innovation Office for South Bend, 2013-2018

Author
Tristan Dreisbach
Country of Reform
Abstract

When Pete Buttigieg became mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2012, the city was struggling to overcome its image as a dying community. More than a thousand abandoned homes blighted urban neighborhoods, and the unemployment rate was more than 10%. Although these problems had their roots in the changing structure of the US economy, Buttigieg said he believed that more-efficient and more-effective government could help the city attract new businesses and residents, charting a path forward. In 2013, he hired Santiago Garces, a 2011 graduate of nearby University of Notre Dame, to create a new office that would identify opportunities for improving city operations and saving money. On a tight budget, Garces assembled a small team of business analysts, who used new technologies to help streamline and modernize the city’s code enforcement department, greatly accelerating the process of dealing with abandoned homes. Garces’s team then took on dozens of other projects to improve service delivery while also consolidating the city’s information technology resources, including outsourcing certain services to cut costs. The unit Garces created produced millions of dollars in savings during its first years and helped the mayor achieve some of his top policy goals. 

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews he and Steven S. Strauss, John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor at Princeton University, conducted in South Bend, Indiana in July 2018. Case published September 2018.

Peter Buttigieg

Ref Batch
B
Ref Batch Number
1
Country of Reform
Interviewers
Tristan Dreisbach
Name
Peter Buttigieg
Interviewee's Position
Mayor, South Bend
Language
English
Town/City
South Bend, Indiana
Country
Date of Interview
Reform Profile
Yes
Abstract

In this interview, South Bend, Indiana, mayor Peter Buttigieg discusses how his administration used innovation and technology to improve municipal government. He explains how his background in consulting informed his use of data to make government more effective and speaks about how civic innovation can help solve the toughest problems his community faces in the face of serious financial constraints, including a state-wide property tax cap. He hired Santiago Garces, a young Notre Dame graduate, to create an innovation office that helped implement the mayor’s biggest policy priorities, including dealing with the city’s many vacant and abandoned properties. He lauds the performance of the city’s business analysts, who worked with city departments to identify problems in their business processes and help them become more efficient and effective. Buttigieg also talks about dealing with internal resistance to new policies. He advises other cities to build partnerships with external actors that can help them harness data and innovation and discusses the importance of government employees having a results mentality, as opposed to a compliance mentality.

Profile

Peter Buttigieg was born in South Bend in 1982, the son of Notre Dame professors. In 2000 he enrolled at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy and political science. After graduating in 2004, he worked on the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry and for the Cohen Group, a business advisory firm. He then received a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford, where he graduated in 2007. He returned to the United States to work at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Co., the global management consulting firm, where he worked on energy and grocery pricing. He left McKinsey in 2010 to campaign full-time for Indiana state treasurer. He was the Democratic Party’s nominee, but lost the general election to his Republican challenger by a large margin. The next year, he entered a crowded field to replace South Bend’s outgoing Democratic mayor. He won the election in November 2011 and took office in 2012 at age 30, at the time the youngest mayor of any city with a population over 100,000. He won reelection in 2015 with more than 80% of the vote. In 2017, he ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee, the national governing body of the Democratic Party. He withdrew prior to the final vote, but the race elevated his national profile and encouraged media speculation that he might run for president.

Reforming Without Hiring or Firing: Identity Document Production in South Africa, 2007-2009

Author
David Hausman
Country of Reform
Abstract

As of January 2008, South African citizens had to wait more than four months, on average, to get a government identity document. The delays in producing IDs, which disrupted lives by preventing citizens from working or accessing government benefits, reflected longstanding organizational problems at the Department of Home Affairs, the agency responsible for issuing the IDs. The processes at each stage of ID production were in disarray, and the department's staff lacked effective supervision. Backlogs developed; workers became demoralized. In 2007, the department began to tackle the problems. This was one component of an ambitious turnaround strategy that targeted the department's core business processes. In the ID production process, a team of consultants and department officials made individual and group performance measurable daily and weekly. The turnaround team avoided backlash by engaging the staff union, removing the threat of job losses as a result of restructuring, and consulting the workers in each section before making changes. The performance-management changes were informal: Managers evaluated employees' and sections' performance in meetings and on wall charts rather than through the formal performance-appraisal system. By the end of 2008, South African citizens received their ID booklets in an average of less than six weeks.

David Hausman drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa in February 2010. Case published April 2011. Case slightly revised and republished March 2013. 

Associated Interview(s):  Mavuso Msimang, Yogie Travern