Syracuse data strategy can be found here.
What does it take to be a data-driven city government? Over the past year, for the City of Syracuse, it has meant a multi-pronged approach. Among our more visible projects is a partnership with Esri we expanded our snowplow map into a winter weather operations tool, tracking the updated sensors in our snow-plowing operations, which received over 10 thousand visits in the first storm of the last season alone and was recognized with an award for Special Achievement in GIS. We have also taken a performance-based approach to implementing the American Rescue Plan injection of $123 million dollars, with a public-facing dashboard that provides updated insights into how well we are spending federal spending dollars, and has been recognized as a national case study. And working side-by-side with our department of public works, we’ve piloted the inclusion of equity metrics in our road reconstruction investments.
When it comes to our underlying data infrastructure, we are expanding into the next level of sophistication. Through a cloud data platform, we will significantly increase our ability to ingest, integrate, access, and analyze data. For our first use case, which we developed this year in close partnership with Microsoft and Tallan, we’ve ingested datasets related to city-issued permits from two different IT systems, and integrated them to provide insights into what permits are getting stuck in the pipeline, visualize long term trends, and give senior leadership real-time metrics for permit issuance.
And to ensure the responsible and transparent use of data and technology, we’ve set in motion a Surveillance Technology Working Group, which has reviewed 7 new technologies proposed by city departments. In parallel, our Open Data Syracuse program counts 30 new datasets (and for each one includes relevant metadata), and we continue to work with community members and city employees to identify other data that is of public interest.
These efforts have not gone unnoticed, and last year Syracuse received the What Works Cities Silver Certification, the premier standard for excellence in use of data and evidence for City government.
The need for a unified vision of municipal data
Quick wins are important for developing a data-driven government. After all, leadership must spend political capital, hire staff and invest in new capabilities. But as we seek to scale data practices across an organization made of 25 departments and thousands of employees, data must be seen as a multi-dimensional discipline - and start including considerations such as literacy (the ability for employees to read and interpret data), infrastructure (the mechanisms to share data efficiently, reliably and without friction), and governance (the policies to ensure that data is valued and handled responsibly).
Our organizational data can be thought of as an “ecosystem”, as these dimensions impact and can augment one another. For example, efforts to improve the quality and reliability of data should not be made separately from the internal policies that govern the use of data. Our investment in cloud data warehousing should serve to define minimum quality standards (say, by enforcing the use of data dictionaries). In turn, our priorities for performance measures (themselves aligned with the administration’s objectives) should guide which projects and datasets to prioritize in any cleaning or integration work.
Hence, this year we spent time drafting our first citywide data strategy.
Process
To define Syracuse’s data strategy, we started by defining organizational priorities and identifying which data challenges were getting in the way of achieving them. To this end we conducted in-depth interviews with several heads of department and senior leaders in the City.
Additionally, we surveyed all departments to better understand where they were along their data trajectory, with almost two third identifying that they couldn’t easily find or access data from other departments as their major pain point. (40% thought it was hard to get data from their own department, which was telling). Half of the respondents indicated that they would like to incorporate advanced analytics into their operations, which indicates a desire and ambition to expand their toolset.
Source: Citywide data needs survey.
To complement this exercise, we looked at the best examples we could find of public sector organizations with a written data strategy. We were also lucky enough to receive the guidance and mentorship of two experts, Joy Bonauguro, Chief Data Officer for the State of California, and Jigyasa Sharma, a researcher at US Ignite and author of their Fostering Civic Trust policy guide.
The result is a document that aligns best practices and current pain points, which encompases milestones across three practice areas. One of our mentors suggests using metaphors to communicate abstract concepts and demystify the conversation around data. To that end, we’ve taken the data metaphor and adapted it to the Syracuse context: becoming a data-driven city is a lot like setting up a restaurant to sell chicken riggies. You will first need to ensure that you have the right sanitary protocols (ensuring the effective governance and stewardship of data), you will need to get comfortable cooking your grandma’s recipe (expanding the city’s capacity and practice for continuous use of data), and set-up a kitchen with the right tools (building a secure, accessible and robust data infrastructure).
Next steps
With a strategy in place, we turn our attention to implementation. Over the next year we will be aiming to complete the objectives in these three areas. Some of these objectives include having a draft of a citywide data inventory, drafting a data privacy ordinance, consolidate data across silos, and engage the community in our open data programs. Onwards.
Syracuse data strategy can be found here.