REDLANDS, CALIF. — For the city of Cleveland’s chief innovation and technology officer (CITO), Elizabeth Crowe, developing an open data management platform in a digitally challenged environment was like being in an episode of the TV show “Hoarders.” The city’s departments had data residing everywhere, from local machines to clusters of sticky notes. As the lead on Cleveland’s open data initiative, Crowe dug into the existing IT infrastructure for the city and uncovered a staggering 130 enterprise systems.
Tasked by Major Justin Bibb, Crowe has taken on the monumental tasks of bringing the city’s public offices into the 21st century, building data dashboards and deploying an open data policy for the city. Prior to her appointment as interim CITO in February, Crowe was named director and founder of the Office of Urban Analytics and Innovation (Urban AI) in August 2022.
“I joked with the mayor that he put me on a path where I didn’t have to build the house,” Crowe said. “I had to go mill the lumber to then build the house, to then figure out how we’re going to deploy some dashboards in the city.”
To set the stage for the challenges Crowe faced getting city hall up to date with technology, she explained that Cleveland’s previous mayor didn’t even have an electronic calendar. “We did not get public-facing emails for the city until 2014, and our police department did not get it until 2018. We have been a little bit of Luddites,” Crowe explained during last week’s Public Sector CIO Summit, held by geographic information system (GIS) software company Esri.
Gaining mayoral support for open data
To modernize the local government offices, Crowe said her team members assessed the business problems and identified their No. 1 directive — getting to open data. Bibb’s second executive order established an open data policy and open data governance board, a move that provided Crowe with the official backing to tell governmental departments they would need to get on board with the data management initiative.
“This executive order declared data as a strategic asset that is critical to meeting the demands of a modern government,” Crowe said.
Thus, the City of Cleveland Open Data Policy was born in December 2023. According to the policy, “By leveraging data as a strategic asset, the City can address challenges proactively, optimize resource allocation, improve service delivery, and increase transparency.” In addition, all city of Cleveland departments were tasked with adopting a framework that includes a data inventory, data standards, data use and infrastructure, open data and a governance board.
Creating a city data inventory
With the mayor’s executive order in place, the next step for Crowe was to create an inventory of what data was already available within Cleveland’s local government.
“Sometimes I would go to people and say, ‘Where is your data?’ And they would point, literally, to the server under their desk. I had to start telling them, ‘If you kick your data when you get your coffee in the morning, we’re doing it wrong. Let’s come up with a better way to tackle this data here.'”
Crowe said she discovered data was residing in disparate locations, from Excel spreadsheets to sticky notes surrounding one staff member’s monitor.
Establishing the tech stack
After inventorying Cleveland’s public data, Crowe’s team set out to select vendors and enterprise data dashboard software. “We had data on-prem, we had data in the cloud, but we had no analytics warehouse that we could then use,” she explained.
When it came to finding a vendor, Crowe said her team focused on the overarching goal of “getting to open data” while “considering each layer of our tech stack and treating each phase of the data separately.”
As a Microsoft shop, Crowe’s team chose Microsoft Azure Commercial Cloud, along with Microsoft Power BI, a data visualization and business intelligence tool. The team also selected Esri as its GIS mapping software vendor.
“I had a greenfield [environment],” Crowe said. “The cool part about a greenfield is I can build a modern tech stack that has prepared us for the next wave of analytics work. The challenge of a greenfield is you don’t have anything to start with. So, you don’t have a framework, and you don’t have a governance.”
Upskilling across Cleveland
Once vendor selection was established, Crowe assessed the technical skills of her 16 team members to determine where they could “become experts” and train other departments, and where she needed to fill in gaps by identifying “a bench of analysts around the city.”
“We knew that we needed folks who would talk about data, who could educate about data, who knew and understood how to use tools in a modern tech stack,” Crowe said. Her team tasked the more than 30 departments across the city with identifying “data leads” — employees with degrees in areas such as data analytics who could meet with Crowe’s team monthly for training and professional development.
Finally, Crowe’s team established a data policy based on a level system from one through four. Level one is data that’s open to the public; level two is operational information like how many help desk tickets come in; level three relates to compliance data such as HIPAA and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA); and level four is restricted and confidential data.
This month marks the two-year anniversary of Cleveland’s open data portal, which Crowe’s team launched in April 2024. Among the public-facing dashboards is a Cleveland Cemetery Viewer tool, which lets residents locate burial plots, and an online 311 dashboard to look up service requests. The team is also working on a property insights tool that will integrate data from 15 city systems into a web map — users will be able to search for information about property ownership, transfers and sales. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Crowe said.
“These are my top three, but we’ve got a ton of other public tools that we’ve been able to build and develop and launch.”
