Mayor Bloomberg’s sleek, new online clearinghouse of data on city government performance has a secret admirer: Governor Spitzer.

Inspired by the mayor’s effort to give the public a better sense of the progress or regression of city agencies, the Spitzer administration is trying to design a similar tool for state government.

Internally, it’s called the Metrics Project. Mr. Spitzer has directed his top aides, including his policy director, Peter Pope, to oversee its construction, which is expected to take about a year.

While it will be largely modeled after the city’s yearly Mayor’s Management Report, as well as the user-friendly, online offshoot of the report that the mayor’s office launched earlier this month, the Metrics Project poses a different and perhaps more daunting challenge for the Spitzer administration.

Unlike city government, whose functions are more clearly defined, Albany’s bureaucracy is larger and more amorphous, stretching over cities, mountain ranges, farms, and suburbs, and overlapping with complex layers of municipal and county government power.

The questions of what statistics to include and, more to the point, what state residents care about and expect from Albany is trickier to answer.

The concerns of a city resident — such as the time it takes to fill a pothole or the response time of a fire department — are not easily translatable on a state level. And people generally have more frequent dealings with their local government than they do with far-flung Albany.

“The state is a very big entity. You almost need to create a government management report agency by agency,” a former top aide to Mr. Bloomberg, William Cunningham, said.

“You have to lower expectations of what you’re going to get from this. If you come up with something more limited, you won’t be achieving the level of transparency the city has,” he said.

Spitzer officials say they already have in mind several statistics that will be included in their report card.

They plan to track how many low-income families enroll in a newly expanded food stamp program, the number of children enrolled in pre-kindergarten, and whether the administration’s state-subsidized health insurance program succeeds in reducing the number of children without coverage.

Mr. Spitzer’s director of operations, Paul Francis, said the administration would pinpoint indicators that suggest broader trends, such as the percentage of adults older than 50 who get a colonoscopy or rates of school violence.

“It’s not just looking at obvious metrics but also factors that are correlated with success. It’s measuring things that aren’t necessarily intuitive,” Mr. Francis said in an interview.

The administration said the final database would be online. It’s not clear how often it would be updated.

Last week, the Bloomberg administration unveiled its Citywide Performance Reporting system, which a mayoral aide described as a Bloomberg terminal for government. The online site feature color-coded findings, including variances, and pie charts that are expected to be updated monthly.

The system stems from the Mayor’s Management Report, an annual document that predates the Bloomberg administration but has been expanded by the mayor. The report has been politically useful for Mr. Bloomberg, who in the mayoral election year 2005 released its findings the day before the Democratic primary.

City officials determined what findings to include in the new online system partly based on the complaints they fielded from residents who called the city’s 311 information line.

A top aide to the governor, Lloyd Constantine, said the administration wouldn’t shy away from findings that show the state to be in decline.

“If things are not improving, then we have to change our tactics,” he said. “If our efforts are counter-productive, we need to know that. You don’t want to hide the results from yourself or the public.”

Mr. Cunningham, the former Bloomberg aide, offered Spitzer officials some advice: “They ought to set up a statewide 311, and at the end of the year, they will know damn well what people are thinking.”