Data-driven cities: A practical guide for public servants

Being a data-driven city offers a long list of benefits that contribute to a better quality of life for residents.

• Enhanced efficiency: By daylighting data about municipal operations and interpreting it into meaningful information, cities can make decisions that result in more responsive and efficient services for residents. By analyzing usage patterns and demand, for instance, cities can optimize routes for garbage collection, adjust public transportation schedules and manage energy consumption more effectively.
• Transparent problem solving: Data allows cities to be on a path of continuous improvement and transparent problem solving. Citizen engagement and feedback, street intersection accidents, public record requests, procurement statistics and building plan check submittals and resubmittals all offer insights to help solve problems. When monitored regularly, this info can quickly help identify concerns, address operational issues proactively and anticipate opportunities and troubles, months or years in advance. When cities grow their working abilities with data, share that data with the public, and communicate openly and transparently with residents, problem solving increases and public trust in government grows.
• Economic growth and innovation: Data collected through business licenses, available publicly through state or federal resources, and able to be shared through partner organizations (e.g., Chamber of Commerce, Business Improvement District, Downtown Association, etc.) can help understand economic clusters and anticipate growing sectors, as well as forecast growth, understand demographic changes and better market and brand the locale. Additionally, cities that integrate data into all that they do, as well as share public information based on data insights often are better positioned to attract businesses and startups that thrive on innovation and technology – thus fueling economic growth and job creation.

As noted earlier, there are real and perceived barriers that stand in the way of cities becoming more data-driven.

• Too expensive: One of the major misconceptions with data-driven cities is that they cost a lot of money to implement and operate. Some city leaders hear the phrase “data-driven” and they picture a technological overhaul that will cost millions. This financial fear holds back some cities, even though valuable data can be obtained from existing paper and digital systems and transformed into valued information easily. It all begins with asking questions like: Where are the contractors based who pull building permits? What are the most common expenditures on city purchasing cards? How many days does it take to get a vacant position filled? The questions will drive the data sources to supply the answers and systems to capture data can be as simple as Excel spreadsheets or as sophisticated as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Asking questions, rather than costs, are more often the barrier to data-driven cities.
• Too much time: As many municipal organizations are short-staffed due to constrained budgets, a common concern is that data-driven cities take more time to establish and maintain. The common adage of “go slow to go fast” is one that applies to data-driven cities. Any municipal organization can start with a long-term mindset to incrementally becoming more data-driven, and it takes city departments undertaking effort to answer important questions – using available data – pertaining to their operations. The organizational muscle memory developed by answering questions through on-hand or publicly available data will ultimately result in time saved rather than time expended. Everything takes time, but the investment of small amounts of time to incrementally integrate data into the work of cities will yield efficacy that results in more effective municipal operations and stewardship of public resources.
• Too risky: Some cities convey concern that being data-driven, in general, will be used as a “gotcha” tool and as a means of highlighting areas of weakness and points of failure of public services. While fear of how data may be used is certainly valid, the public availability of data and the proactive use of data by cities in itself are successes in serving the public interest, advancing public benefit, and building public trust. Sure, there may be instances where a member of the public may use data to identify a trend or issue unknown to the municipality that could cause embarrassment to employees or elected officials; however, such circumstances are usually an exception to what’s normal and, when they do occur, they demonstrate that government is of the people and provides an opportunity for the city to not only address the problem but also acknowledge the value of transparency. Data doesn’t always tell the desired story or send city leaders down the path that fits a predefined agenda. In the end, data results in better decision-making, improved city operations, and advances a more transparent government to the people it serves.