Data Officer

Louisville’s Data Officer runs the city’s open data website, data governance team, data analytics projects, data warehousing, external partnerships, and automation across the city.

While private companies have had Chief Data Officers for years to save money, create efficiencies, automate processes, and use data to make informed decisions, they are relatively new in government. Louisville became the 12th US city to hire a Data Officer in 2016, and by 2019 there are 25 at the city/county level, 17 at the state level including Kentucky, and over a dozen at federal agencies.

Open Data

The Data Officer is responsible for the city’s Open Data website, including public feedback, data quality, proactive publishing of data, automation, working with department data experts, policy revisions, annual reports, updates, and data privacy.

Data Governance

The Data Officer runs the city’s internal Data Governance team which includes 60+ Metro employees that work with data and represent every city department and has built a data-driven culture across the city, breaking down silos and fostering collaboration.

Automation and Improvement

The Data Officer is creating the city’s first data warehouse and automation system to allow departments to see each other’s data for the first time, save time by improving the flow of data across systems and to the public, and create tools for departments, city leaders, and the public to make informed decisions about funding, prioritization, and optimization of data-driven projects and decisions.

Project Examples

1. Amazon City on a Cloud grant for “Dream Big” Mobility Project - $50,000.
2. Amazon AWS Credits for IT Cloud training - $10,000.
3. Waze WARP open source multi-city partnership project (80+ governments/cities) collaboratively funded by Amazon Web Services, other cities, and private companies (Amazon case study) creating an analysis tool. - $100,000 to 500,000 in savings.
4. Centennial CO, InterDev, Amazon funding to Louisville Web Developer Slingshot - $30,000.
5. Using free Waze data to replace paid traffic studies - $50,000 to 300,000 savings per year.
6. Open Data created a community gallery, 3x more usage (downloads), new in-demand datasets published for public, journalists, universities, and app companies.
7. Data Governance cross functional data policy, training, culture, data extraction.
8. Launched Louisville Metro Digital Badges training and recognition program with two tracts: data scouts and innovation pioneers, 40 employees earning 130+ badges.
9. Improvements to data standards, quality, collection, analysis, sharing, policy across the city.
10. Reducing duplicative efforts, tools, and projects across departments.
11. Data Driven projects – LouieStat automation, Waze, CNET Smart Apartment, IFTTT, Digital Inclusion, Hackathons, Data4Democracy, Redlining, Bird/Lime mobility data analysis.
12. UofL Partnership - Predictive Analytics on Health Department Restaurant Inspections prioritization.
13. SpeedUp USA Digital Inclusion open source collaboration
14. Harvard Ash Center Civic Analytics Network (CAN) – Open Letter to the Open Data Community, Data Standards, Dockless Mobility Open Letter
15. US DOT Secure Data Commons project first pilot city.
16. Founding the Open Government Coalition – Cities building common tools together for free.
17. Data Inventory of Metro’s data assets for internal and public use.
18. Training for Data Governance employees using WWC GovEx courses - $10-50K.
19. Annual Open Data Report - cataloging our progress (2018).
20. Organizes public events, meetings, and hackathons around open data and transparency.

Chief Data Officer Value

• Harvard Kennedy School - Discovering the True Value of City Data Experts
• Harvard Ash Center - Lessons from Leading CDOs
• Harvard Civic Analytics Network - US CDO Profiles
• Smart Cities Dive - Rise of the Chief Data Officer
• AWS Institute - The Chief Data Officer as a Data Leader