Case Study
Metric-based funding strategy for citywide social programs.
The Challenge
Belfast City Council had recently been given responsibility for disseminating federal funding for social programs across Belfast. In a three-week period of on-site strategy consultation, they requested a new method of funding social and community programs that didn’t rely on existing Protestent-Catholic community divisions.
The Solution
As part of a team of six senior IBMers, I developed a well-being measure that could be used as a common outcome metric for all social and community programs as a way to assess impact with their intended citizens. This metric provided a way to assess program efficacy objectively, simply and flexibly. The metric was the centerpiece of IBM’s city-wide technology solution to collect data and ultimately fund programs based on participant success and positive community impact.
My well-being metric was the centerpiece of IBM’s healthcare technology solution for Belfast City Council.
In the final presentation to over 250 community and political leaders, I told the story of Belfast’s ongoing divisions in a new context: that of Memphis’s troubled history of racial tension and said that a way past the emotion of history to a better society was through objective, comparative data. Today, a version of the metric I proposed has been adopted in Belfast, throughout Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and proposed in the UK.
