When Syracuse devised its City’s Cloud-based data platform, it became evident that the first step towards creating a data-driven culture was breaking data silos by cataloging, cleaning, combining, and consolidating datasets that existed in numerous systems across multiple departments.
As datasets constantly evolve and grow, the need to proactively monitor changes, update systems, and evaluate the usefulness of our data was also evident. Thus determining broader data policies as an ongoing citywide program was needed. We called this our City’s data governance program.
That led to June 2022, when the City of Syracuse started its Data Governance Committee to enable the organization to create a data ecosystem where our data assets are easier to find and access, and our data practices maintain responsible, ethical, and safe standards of use that comply with legal requirements.
What is data governance?
Data governance refers to the standards, policies, and procedures that govern our organization’s data assets. It focuses on the daily tasks that keep information usable, understandable, and protected. This includes assigning responsibility for defining and implementing the policies and processes for sharing and processing data, creating procedures for naming and storing data, and establishing measurements for keeping data clean and usable. Syracuse’s data governance program seeks to:
· Make data available so people can easily find and use both structured and unstructured data.
· Maintain data consistency to standardize data fields across databases and departments and make data easy to manipulate and navigate to make consistent decisions.
· Maintain data accuracy by deleting, updating, or correcting stale or irrelevant data to maintain the integrity and value of analytics.
· Support data privacy and responsible access to data
· Support data security to ensure sensitive data is properly defined and protected across all locations
How did we make it happen?
Putting a framework and structure to manage the program was a complicated task but reviewing the literature and best practices around data governance, backed up by multiple conversations with our peer cities, worked as a starting point. However, as every local government has its own culture, we modified the results to the City’s specific needs, practices, and culture. The process started by clarifying the mission statement, identifying the actors, and establishing a decision-making and policy-making dynamic between them as:
Mission statement
The Syracuse Data Governance program works to identify the direction, policies, best practices, and objectives of data management aligned with the Mayoral goals. The purpose is to help departments collect data, share, and address data needs, pain points, and associated risks. The formal data governance strategy will increase accountability and transparency by allowing residents and other departments to quickly and accurately obtain information about the status of City operations which will contribute to better services and decrease the risk of data mismanagement.
Roles and Responsibilities
The City of Syracuse has a combination of top-down, expert-led, and collective decision-making processes. Therefore, the program was formed with a collaborative and multi-directional approach at the confluence of two main groups with two separate yet complementary sets of responsibilities: the Data Governance Committee and the Data Governance Steering Council. While the former works as the working group, focusing on the departments’ data assets, needs, conflicts, and future, the latter became the executive team where the decision for the City’s data program is made. Sometimes the executive group dictates the priority area and policy direction, while the working group discusses the best way to enact policies and procedures. Other times working groups present ideas on opportunities for changes based on their experiences working with and managing the organization’s data.
The members of the data governance committee are called data stewards. That is a person who regularly accesses the data and understands what information is in the data. The purpose of the executive committee-working group model is to include a variety of participants and experience levels. It is an effective way of alleviating culture change concerns. The data governance committee provides opportunities for data stewards of all backgrounds and technical understanding to participate and share their experiences. Data stewards build confidence in data use and become advocates in their departments.
Scope of work
The data governance program has pursued four focus areas so far:
Data Inventory
Sticking to the data governance start point, the initial work was focused on developing the data inventory to catalog the City’s data assets. As silos create inefficiencies, enabling more comprehensive internal access is essential. Being shared on the open data portal, datasets allow a large community of analysts and scientists who struggle to find, understand, trust, and use data in innovative ways.
Open Data Portal
The data governance workstream has created a synergy with the Open Data Portal and has already delivered a major win. Since June, several datasets have been added to the Open Data Portal to provide the public with more comprehensive access to the City’s data. We have also developed a standardized protocol for putting datasets into the portal. Having this protocol in place enables us to make the process faster and guarantee that quality data is delivered to constituents.
Data Quality
Data is of bad quality when it is not fit for consumption in whatever way we intend to use it. As a part of data governance, we devised a data quality program to:
· Focus on the most essential data for the organization first
· Be a long-term commitment, not a one-time project
· Identify root causes
· Measure data quality issues objectively
· Set metrics of success that are constantly monitored
· Be preventative: using what we learned from previous data issues to inform the design of better systems and processes
Data access Contracting language
Data access contracting language was another scope of work from the Data Governance meetings. It involves the norms, requests, expectations, and standard practices that help the city manage, negotiate, and advance contracting processes. A general-purpose software services agreement will be the outcome of this project. It will be a short document to be used at the front end of negotiating services and RFPs to facilitate data-related conversations with vendors and collaborators.
Lesson learned
It is less than a year since the City is in the data governance process, and the learning curve is still steep. As we progress, we collect feedback and learn, modify the plan, and adjust the workflow, expected outcomes, and scope of work while sticking to the foundation we have built. The following principles have helped us through the process:
· Every City has its own decision-making culture, so it is important to adjust a citywide program like the data governance to these dynamics. The program should fit and complement the current dynamics to ensure a smooth organizational change for treating data. The rich literature and best practices are a great starting point, but adaptation is essential to ensure success and acceptance.
· It is crucial to have a mission statement. It works as a north star and provides clarity when the program management gets into the weeds of multiple projects, stakeholders, and pressing deliverables.
· The program doesn’t have to be planned entirely before getting started. It involves people and processes, change management, and unforeseeable scope of work. Having an agile approach can help with this.
· Data governance is a long-term and intricate program. It has interdependencies with the City’s data infrastructure, data strategy, privacy and cybersecurity policies, and legal processes. This nature entails:
· Adjusting the expectations.
· Breaking down the steps into multiple short-term and mid-term timelines with realistic goals.
· Encouraging data stewards and keeping the momentum.
· From a program management perspective, it is crucial to have a robust documentation system in place. The documentation allows for keeping track of stakeholders’ consensus, processes, and milestones.