January 12, 2010

Stroger Jumpstarts Optima Program to Cut Costs, Improve Efficiencies Across County Operations

Broad-based initiative is designed to drive agencies across County to collaborate more aggressively on productivity to improve cost-savings, operational improvements, enhanced services, and non-tax revenues.

Cook County Board President Todd H. Stroger was joined by his Chief Financial Officer, Jaye Morgan Williams, Chip Hardt of Electronic Knowledge Interchange (EKI), and staff from Cook County’s Finance Bureau to announce the expansion a broad-based initiative to dramatically enhance the efficiency of County operations and the effectiveness of services provided to residents. CFO Williams assumed direct leadership of the effort in late December.

Ms. Williams runs the CFO’s Office of Performance Transformation and Management, which has day-to-day oversight of the effort, and from which the program, called OPTIMA, gets its name.  The initiative is designed to transform County operations using the same methods that the world’s best-run companies and governments use to rapidly identify and implement opportunities to drive productivity. 

OPTIMA has three specific goals: achieving greater efficiencies, improving the quality of County services, and generating higher non-tax sources of revenue. Overall, OPTIMA is projected to deliver $300 million in productivity gains over the next 3 years.

 “This initiative will improve business processes, use technology more wisely, measure performance accurately, and enable us to hold our people more accountable,” said President Stroger. “We’ve made great strides in the last three years – including 21% cuts overall in the agencies I supervise since I took office in 2006. That said, it’s urgent that we push even harder to increase productivity, find innovative cost-cutting opportunities, and improve services -- all while maintaining the capacity to deliver vital services. OPTIMA is designed to build on our commitment over the last three years to streamline government, further reduce our workforce, and bring our operations fully into the 21st Century – and today, this effort is all the more important because of the sales tax rollback’s negative impact on our revenue stream.”

President Stroger began implementing cost-cutting efficiencies the day he took office, through initiatives ranging from reducing the County’s headcount of jobs by more than 2,500 – the lowest staffing level in nearly two decades – to plugging a $500 million deficit he confronted the day he was sworn in. The President has succeeded in holding the line on both the County’s overall spending and property taxes (which have remained flat at $720 million for fourteen years). However, the County Board’s decision late last year to roll back by half a penny the 1.75% component of the sales tax created an anticipated deficit of $200 million for the 2011 fiscal year.

That sentiment was echoed by Cook County CFO Jaye Williams.

“This is a conscious commitment to operate at a significantly higher level of productivity for the long term,” said Ms. Williams. “OPTIMA embraces three key activities that will build and sustain the County’s capacity to perform more productively.”

Specifically, OPTIMA will be used to: design the operating model and enterprise architecture for process change and technology decision-making; plan the implementation of proven best practices for generating cost, service, and revenue enhancements; and develop the Cook County Program Management Initiative (CCPMI) as the focal point of for executing this result-driven transformation.

“We're looking at everything we do – including our interactions with County residents and our internal operations – to implement more productive processes and to make it easier for residents to work with County government,” added President Stroger. “Process improvement work is already underway inside many teams across the County. OPTIMA will lead to fundamentally reduced costs, improved performance, and enhanced services -- all resulting in easing the burden on County taxpayers and improving the return on their hard-earned tax dollars.

“Let me be clear,” said Stroger. “Under this initiative, nothing is off the table, including the barriers and costly duplication among agencies and separate elected offices that drive so much inefficiency across the County. It’s imperative that every aspect of County government – whether functioning under my oversight or under the auspices of our many different elected officials -- join forces in this effort. While we all work together broadly across the County today, OPTIMA will strengthen that collaboration and provide the horsepower to deliver the effective services and efficient operations Cook County residents deserve.”