As the data services lead inside the Maryland Information Technology Department, Julia Fischer heads up a team of eight people.
The statewide office’s role is to direct strategic enterprise data efforts. Its customers are other state departments and employees, a force of greater than 15,000 people.
Some basic arithmetic finds there are almost 2,000 state employees for every member of Fischer’s statewide data services team – an unflattering ratio representative of the uphill challenges that confront government data and analytics teams.
Central data offices across government are outnumbered in staff, time and budget.
The aspiration for these offices is to coordinate incisive, cross-cutting analytical and data-based projects, improve data maturity and expand data services. The reality is more foundational: problem-solving and trouble-shooting backlogs of requests, while building basic data literacy and standardization.
“I believe that those fundamental conversations are even more important than those conversations on how to analyze data,” said Fischer, Director of Data Services, on GovLoop’s recent panel about data skills in government.
Stefanie Costa Leabo, Boston’s Chief Data Officer, counts herself as fortunate. She has a staff of 20, one of the more impressive tallies for local government data departments. But she too has found that it’s helpful to take a step back before launching into aspirational analytic projects.
Her goal is to foster data literacy across departments and, hopefully, stoke internal investment so that one 20-person department isn’t responsible for a whole city’s worth of analytics. Those efforts, which include one-on-one trainings and templates for how to design surveys, have had success.
The Fire Department has taken her up on her ask. After collaborating closely on several projects, the Boston ..
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