City of Weston, Florida: Government BI Analytics
Transforming municipal government with transparent, data-driven decision-making
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Transforming municipal government with transparent, data-driven decision-making
By Errin O'Connor, Founder & Chief AI Architect, EPC Group
EPC Group helped the City of Weston, Florida — a municipality of 70,000+ residents in Broward County — implement Microsoft Power BI for budget transparency, citizen services analytics, and departmental reporting. Service request resolution time dropped from 8.5 days to 4.2 days. Citizen satisfaction scores improved by 25%. Departmental reporting became 60% faster.
EPC Group assisted the City of Weston, Florida in utilizing Microsoft Power BI. This collaboration aimed to:
These efforts helped to strengthen citizen trust and engagement.
60%
Faster Budget Reporting
25%
Citizen Satisfaction Increase
8
Departments Connected
70K+
Citizens Served
The City of Weston, in Broward County, Florida, has a population of over 70,000 residents. It faced challenges due to its outdated reporting system. This system could not keep up with the increasing demand for government transparency and data-driven policy decisions.
City leaders wanted to enhance their ability to track and share:
Opaque budget processes: Annual budget data was stored in PDF documents and static spreadsheets. This made it hard for city commissioners and residents to see how taxpayer dollars were allocated across departments.
Siloed departmental data: Eight departments -- including Parks & Recreation, Public Works, Community Services, and Finance -- each maintained separate reporting systems with no cross-departmental analytics capability.
Citizen service blind spots: The city lacked consolidated metrics on service request resolution times, permit processing durations, and resident satisfaction scores, making performance improvement difficult to measure.
Commission meeting prep: Staff dedicated over 40 hours before each monthly commission meeting to compile reports manually. This process often resulted in data that was 2-3 weeks outdated by the time it was presented.
EPC Group developed a Power BI analytics platform specifically for municipal government. This platform emphasizes transparency, compliance with Florida Sunshine Laws, and accessibility for citizens.
The solution features:
We created an embedded Power BI dashboard on the city's website. This tool allows residents to explore budget allocations by department, fund, and category.
Interactive drill-downs reveal how every dollar is spent, covering areas such as:
We implemented detailed access controls. This allows department directors to view only their specific data. The city manager can access information from all departments. Public-facing dashboards show only approved, anonymized data. This ensures compliance with Florida public records requirements.
We developed a real-time scorecard to track various metrics. This includes:
We measure response times and resolution rates against SLA targets for each department.
Automated the generation of commission meeting data packets with live Power BI reports. Commissioners now access real-time dashboards on tablets during meetings, enabling data-driven policy discussions.
Monthly and quarterly budget reports that used to take more than 5 days to compile are now created in real time. Department heads can access live budget vs. actual dashboards. This change removes the need to wait for finance to produce static reports.
The city's online transparency dashboard saw more than 12,000 unique visitors in its first year. Residents could explore budget data by department and category. This portal received recognition from the Florida Government Finance Officers Association.
Tracking and improving service request resolution times can lead to significant benefits. For example, the average resolution time dropped from 8.5 days to 4.2 days.
As a result, overall citizen satisfaction scores increased by 25% in the annual resident survey. This improvement included notable gains in responsiveness ratings.
Pre-meeting report preparation time has dropped from over 40 hours to less than 4 hours. Commissioners now utilize live dashboards for data-driven decisions. This change has led to:
City leadership can now compare performance metrics across all 8 departments. They use standardized KPIs for this purpose. This change has helped identify best practices in Parks & Recreation, which are now being replicated across Community Services.
Historical revenue data and grant usage trends support forecasting models. These models assist the city in planning multi-year budgets.
Additionally, grant compliance reporting time has decreased by 50%. This improvement ensures ongoing eligibility for federal and state funding.
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“EPC Group transformed how our city communicates budget and performance data to both our commissioners and our residents. The public transparency dashboard has become one of our most visited web pages, and our staff now spends time analyzing data instead of compiling spreadsheets. The Power BI implementation has fundamentally changed how we make decisions as a city -- everything is data-driven now.”
Power BI enables municipalities to create interactive, public-facing dashboards that allow citizens to explore budget allocations by department, fund, and category. Real-time data refresh means budget-vs-actuals reports are always current, eliminating the weeks-long manual report compilation process. Row-level security ensures internal operational data remains protected while public dashboards display only approved, anonymized information compliant with state open records laws.
Yes, Power BI can be configured to comply with Florida Sunshine Laws and similar state transparency requirements. EPC Group implements Publish to Web for public dashboards while maintaining Azure AD with MFA for internal staff access. PII masking, row-level security, and audit trails ensure that sensitive employee or citizen data is never exposed in public-facing reports while still meeting open government data mandates.
A typical municipal Power BI implementation takes 12-20 weeks depending on the number of departments, data sources, and complexity of reporting requirements. EPC Group follows a phased approach: discovery and data assessment (weeks 1-4), data integration and modeling (weeks 5-10), dashboard development and UAT (weeks 11-16), and training and rollout (weeks 17-20). Cities with fewer data sources or simpler requirements can often complete in 10-12 weeks.
Power BI connects to virtually any government operations system including Tyler Technologies (ERP/financials), CityWorks (asset management), SeeClickFix (311 service requests), Accela (permitting and licensing), utility billing systems, GIS platforms, and legacy databases. EPC Group builds automated ETL pipelines using Power BI Dataflows and on-premises data gateways to securely extract, transform, and load data from these systems on scheduled refresh cycles.
Power BI provides real-time dashboards tracking citizen service request resolution times, permit processing durations, code enforcement response rates, and utility billing metrics against SLA targets. By measuring and visualizing these KPIs, department heads can identify bottlenecks, reallocate resources, and implement process improvements. The City of Weston saw citizen satisfaction scores increase 25% and service request resolution times drop from 8.5 days to 4.2 days after implementing Power BI analytics.
EPC Group specializes in Power BI implementations for state and local government, with deep expertise in public transparency, compliance, and citizen services analytics. Contact us for a free consultation.
EPC Group assisted the City of Weston, Florida, which has over 70,000 residents in Broward County. They implemented Microsoft Power BI to enhance:
As a result:
Weston recognized that its legacy reporting infrastructure was failing to meet growing demands for government transparency and data-driven policy decisions.
EPC Group deployed Power BI connecting Weston's government operations systems to a unified analytics platform.
EPC Group connected Power BI to Weston's full government operations tech stack.
Weston published Power BI dashboards for citizens to view city budget and service data without logging in. This was a significant step in government transparency.
EPC Group creates various tools for municipal governments. These include:
Our dashboards work seamlessly with Tyler Technologies, CityWorks, Accela, SeeClickFix, and GIS platforms.
Power BI connects to the city's ERP and financial systems. It pulls budget and spending data to create a public dashboard for citizens. This dashboard is accessible without logging in.
The City of Weston adopted this method to:
A municipal Power BI implementation typically takes between 8 and 16 weeks. The exact duration varies based on the number of source systems and the complexity of the dashboards.
For instance, the City of Weston project included:
EPC Group offers a detailed timeline during the discovery call.
EPC Group delivers Power BI analytics for municipal governments and public sector organizations. Call (888) 381-9725 or request a 30-minute discovery call.
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