No, your city doesn't need another dashboard
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COMMENTARY | It's time to stop checking boxes with tech we don't use, and reset.
In cities all over the world, dedicated public servants start their day by pulling up dashboards.
Are the numbers up or down? What's changed since last week? City leaders await their reports with questions of their own. What can we do based on this data? How can I hear the important voices, challenges, and learnings from each department and team member? This makes sense. We look for patterns in numbers and when we find them, we hope for calm and control.
But more often, different questions creep in: Are these even the numbers we need? Do we actually use all of them? Do we need more, or do we need less? A jittery feeling creeps into the whole city government. Talk of data becomes all-consuming, and yet the answers often seem out of reach. This anxious voice is a good one to heed. More often than we currently do, cities should listen to those persistent, insistent questions and embrace a simple solution: stop trying to dashboard everything. Instead, create space for the stories your data can't tell.
For too long, city leaders have gotten caught up in "enframing" everything, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger might say. In plain English this means cities are trying to harness every resource and every data point every moment of every day. To do it, the average city now toggles between 112 applications. It was not cheap. All told, state and local governments spend around $143 billion per year on IT, including dashboards and tools.
But more than the financial cost of building these extensive harnessing tools, there's a high emotional cost. Nearly half of city employees report burnout and emotional drain, not from doing the work itself, but from the mental load of working with this glut of applications and tools. All the while, it's not giving us the answers we are looking for.
Take New York City, for example. In December 2025, the comptroller released a damning report: despite a flashy capital projects dashboard, it only tracked 47% of project IDs and 58% of planned commitments. Major departments like Education weren't even included. The result? Officials were making decisions about $73.9 billion in projects while "flying blind," as the comptroller put it.
New York isn't alone. Cities across the country have discovered that pouring resources into more data tools doesn't automatically lead to better outcomes.
But some cities are finding a better path. In Seattle, Councilmember Dan Strauss didn't just rely on data. He led walking tours, opened surveys with more than 1,000 responses, and held public hearings where 200 speakers shaped policy. The result? The survey was "incredibly successful," as Strauss said, in shaping amendments adopted by the Council.
The lesson is clear: chasing more data without human insight creates an illusion of control. Moreover, as cities are trying to test, pilot, and scale what's working, sometimes static metrics are easily seen, but the dynamic growth from these experiments takes place over a period of time and takes time to reveal itself. Solely relying on the numbers may not be helpful or, sometimes, may discourage leaders from dropping a potential pilot to solve a problem early on before it has had time to demonstrate its full impact.
Numbers and dashboards are still important. They can help build a data culture at the local and city level and they remove our personal biases. In some cases they are more reliable, and there is good reason to use them for status reports and communicating to different stakeholders.
However, instead of top-down mandates for data, we need bottom-up tracking so that people at the lowest level, whatever data they need in their daily work, are the ones tracking and reporting it. They're closer to the communities and more nimble when it comes to changing what data is making sense and what's not. Releasing that sole burden from the tools could be a powerful antidote.
City leaders can do it without a major overhaul by starting to think thoughtfully about the data they are using on an everyday basis and taking small steps rather than building everything from scratch. Set smaller, concrete goals: like removing one metric from a dashboard which is not used or required, holding one meeting dashboard-free, listening more to people and communities on the ground, and piloting bottom-up tracking.
The goal isn't to abandon data; it's to make room for the learning that numbers alone cannot provide. Start small, but start now. Because the cost of inaction is not only burnout but the loss of our ability to fully see and serve the communities we lead.
Komal Goel has worked as an advisor and consultant on urban economic development in more than half a dozen countries. She is currently a master's candidate at Harvard Kennedy School.