How Arlington County, Virginia, Made Improving Performance a Core Capability

Three decades of performance management. New programs, new experts, new technology. Yet the analyst is still exporting data to Excel and doing the work by hand.

What if the problem isn't a lack of technology or expertise, but the way analytical work gets done?

Gus Caravalho spent a decade inside local government working through this problem. Join him and Brandon Pace for a candid conversation about what changed at Arlington County, why traditional approaches often fall short, and what a capability-first approach looks like in practice.

Save your seat

October 13, 2026 · 1:30 PM ET · Online

You'll get your confirmation and calendar invite.

Meet us in person at ICMA, October 18–20.

Gus and Brandon will be at Booth #1061. Book a twenty-minute meeting and set the agenda yourself.

Local government is thirty years into the performance management era. Has it worked?

Since performance indicators first appeared in budget documents in the late 1990s, local governments have tried one approach after another: balanced scorecards, PerformanceStat meetings, “evidence-based everything,” Chief Data and AI Officers, and now AI productivity assistants. Yet the person doing the actual analysis is often still working manually in Excel, waiting for data and rebuilding the same analysis again and again.

Gus Caravalho's argument, based on ten years inside a county: by and large, it hasn't worked, because none of it ever changed the thing that actually does the analysis. That's the individual analyst, working manually in Excel, waiting on a data request.

In 2024 he built a different approach, one centered on the people already doing the work rather than on new experts or new technology. He will be joined by Brandon Pace, who has spent over a decade helping organizations turn technology investments into actual changes in how work gets done. Through their discussion, they will talk about why a staff-based capability approach beats an expert-led or technology-led one, and what it takes to actually put it into practice.

You'll leave with a clearer way to look at your own organization.

A different way to think about capability

What “analytical capability” actually means, and why it is different from simply adding more dashboards, tools or specialists.

A closer look at what gets in the way

Why performance initiatives can stall when the analyst doing the work still has to spend their time finding, preparing and reshaping data.

A practical starting point

Questions you can take back to your own team to understand where analytical work is getting stuck and what could change.

Is this session for you?

This conversation is especially relevant if you're responsible for performance, finance, IT, data or reporting, but the person doing the day-to-day analysis should be part of the conversation too.

Know an analyst who spends too much time finding, preparing or reshaping data? Send them this session.

Who you'll hear from

Gus Caravalho

Principal Enterprise Architect, SplashBI

A longtime veteran of local government's "analytical capability," serving most recently as Financial Data and Analytics Manager for Arlington County, VA. He is currently Principal Enterprise Architect at SplashBI, an enterprise analytics company empowering analysts to make the dream of data-driven decision making finally a reality.

Brandon Pace

Regional Sales Director, SplashBI

Over a decade in consulting and technology, spanning account management, human resources, quality assurance and enterprise software. He is currently Regional Sales Director at SplashBI, where he works with organizations to improve how their processes run and to align the technology they choose with what they are trying to achieve.

Going to the ICMA Annual Conference? Meet the SplashBI Team.

Gus and Brandon will both be at Booth #1061, October 18–20, plus the people who handle the technical and procurement questions you'll actually need answered. Book a twenty-minute meeting and set the agenda yourself.