In this episode Professor Stephen Goldsmith interviews Denver's Chief Data Officer Paul Kresser, who discusses how to responsibly use data to improve governance and services for city residents.
In this episode Professor Stephen Goldsmith and Denver's Chief Data Officer Paul Kresser talk about the importance of ethically and responsibly using data to inform policy and service delivery. Kresser also discusses Denver's strong data culture, how to incorporate data literacy into department trainings, and why it's important to have this work codified legislatively.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Betsy Gardner:
Hi, this is Betsy Gardner, Senior Editor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Since we started this podcast, we've had great support from our listeners. And to make sure that you don't miss an episode, please find us under the new Data-Smart City Pod channel wherever you listen. Make sure to subscribe so you get each episode, and thanks for listening.
Steve Goldsmith:
Welcome back to our podcast. This is Steven Goldsmith. I'm a Professor of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Another one of our podcasts on the role of data and technology in improving the quality of urban services. And we have a particularly interesting guest today. Paul Kresser who's the Chief Data Officer for the City and County of Denver. Welcome, Paul.
Paul Kresser:
Thanks, my pleasure being here.
Steve Goldsmith:
So, let's start with just a little background of what were you doing before you had this job and what is the portfolio in your current job?
Paul Kresser:
Sure. So, before joining City and County of Denver back in 2015, I was actually with the City of Boston, working in their IT department as one of their directors. So, spent about 10 years in Boston. Decided wanted a change and moved the family out to Denver, where I took a job in Denver's Department of Community and Planning Development. What I was brought in to do was take a look at the data and see how the data can actually help guide some of the decision-making amongst leadership of that department. Proud to say, when I started, wait times to be seen at the permit counter exceeded, on average, five hours, and that wait time got all the way down to under 15 minutes. So, from that experience, when the Chief Data Officer position was created in Denver, I applied for it, and I was fortunate enough to have been selected and I've been serving in that role now for just over three years.
Steve Goldsmith:
So, Paul, Denver has a reputation of employee empowerment through its PEAK Academy, and we at the Harvard Kennedy School have been spending a lot of time on how to improve data skills, data literacy in the hopes that that would create transformative changes in the way we conduct city works. So, one issue is just empowerment, generally, AKA PEAK Academy and another is maybe a subset or related to that is data literacy and transforming the skills. You can think about it and think of a number of ways that employees could become more empowered, but they didn't have tech tools to do it. But then somebody would think about how to incorporate the tech tools as part of the empowerment. So, with that long-winded question, talk to us a little bit about the lessons you've learned from your work on data tools in governance, and then let's relate them to some specific examples like permitting, if you would.
Paul Kresser:
Sure. Happy to. Yeah. So, as you mentioned, Steve, Denver's very proud of our PEAK Academy. The program has, at this point, trained thousands of city and county of Denver employees, as well as employees of staff from other cities who have come to Denver and received the training. So, I lead the data tools and governance division within our central IT department. Technology services have a staff of over 30 folks. Data architects, data engineers, data visualization experts. And we work as a team with programs like PEAK Academy to be able to present the services we offer to the city and county in our 50-plus business units. So, we attend the PEAK Academy trainings. We give presentations on how we're leveraging data. I think it often becomes very clear. One of the biggest challenges that get identified through trainings like PEAK Academy is people don't have access to the data, or they don't even know what, frankly, what data they need to look at.
So, what my division tries to do is make that data available, make it accessible to them, but simultaneously train them and inform them on how to properly, responsibly, ethically use this data within our governance processes and practices to make sure that the way it's being applied, A, leads to a positive outcome. And for us, that means at least an outcome that improves the quality of services we deliver, improves citywide performance, but is also we're using the data in a manner, again, that our residents, our constituents, the people we're collecting that data and who we're responsible to for as the custodians of that data, that we're using it ethically, and responsibly, and for the right purposes.
Steve Goldsmith:
Yeah. That makes sense. There's some offices in cities that look at themselves as service agencies, right? So that an agency has a question, and they help them solve the question with data. Others look at themselves as evangelists for the use of data, right? Doing data training, data literacy, data schools, how you would use a particular piece of software better, or for more insightful purposes. How do you think about those two functions inside your office?
Paul Kresser:
Yeah. So, we do a little bit of both. There are some issues in some of the agencies, and it really depends on maturity of the agencies and the staff they have in those agencies of whether they can do that data work themselves or if they need to come to us for assistance. It's our goal. We're promoting a self-service model, an adaptive analytics self-service model. We recognize, I'm very fortunate, I know I have a lot of resources relative to my peers, but it's still not enough for all the data needs of the city. So, the only sustainable way I see is to train and to work with the folks in the agencies to build up their data skills, their data literacy skills, so they can apply and do the work themselves. Then, what we focus on in my division is making that data available.
It's providing the platforms. It's providing our Denver data hub, which is our system of record for reporting that all the agencies, all the talent in the agencies 200 plus analysts can tap into and use the data in our data hub for their analytical purposes. We govern it. We have very strong governance practices around what data is allowed to enter our data hub. They have to go through privacy threshold assessments. We have to assign ownership. We have to train the data stewards that are going to be responsible for that. And then, we maintain it as a central platform and all the plumbing associated with it.
But ultimately, really on the agency and the subject matter experts in those agencies to unlock the power of that data because, truthfully, we'll never understand the data as well as somebody who works with whether it's public safety data, permitting data, public works data. It doesn't really matter. The subject matter experts will always understand the data better than we will in a central IT department. So, we just want to make sure that they have the access to it. They have the training, they have the resources, and they know who to call when they run into challenges.
Steve Goldsmith:
So, let me push on you a little bit, Paul. If we think about the Denver data culture if you will. So, what you just said makes sense. Let me ask you a slightly different question. What instead of data literacy, we're thinking about software applications literacy. Let's take an example, maybe GIS, where multiple departments would have licenses or access to a GIS system, and where their collaborative use of a tool like GIS. One way to think about it is the way you just answered, which is how to create more autonomous ability inside a department. But what happens if it's a platform that goes across multiple departments like GIS, what's your role there?
Paul Kresser:
Yeah. So, GIS is part of my division as well. We have multiple GIS administrators and analysts. They serve a similar role. They work with the GIS resources in the departments as well. They provide training, best practice. We serve as the center of excellence. We manage, obviously, the technology components of it, and then we help facilitate the work in a lot of the conversation, especially cross-agency. And I'll give you a great recent example of that.
Maybe a year or two ago, our public safety agencies using GIS tools identified five hotspots of activity that they really wanted to dedicate resources to and focus their efforts on reducing activity, public safety, criminal type activity within these hotspots. And that's been largely successful. A few months ago, we wanted to apply that same type of analysis to public health hotspots as well. So, analysts, basically a task force was created from talent across five or six agencies, including, obviously, us in technology services that were going look at all, turned out to be dozens of public health indicators, and focus on identifying what we're going to define as our public health hotspots, that then we can service and send the appropriate type of resources to address the type of issues occurring within those areas.
So, some of the indicators, the GIS layers we're looking at, and these are layers owned and maintained by different agencies say fatality information relative to suicide or drug overdoses. They looked at calls for mental health where we have encampments across the city, where we've already gone our new social workers and housing specialists have already gone for outreach. Calls to 911 areas of high domestic violence, child abuse, and neglect. So all of these different kind of layers were pulled in together through this task force model, layered upon each other. Each agency published their data too. And then, now we're going through the analysis of it in a coordinated manner to identify where we're going to end up focusing our resources.
Steve Goldsmith:
Yeah. That's a very good example. We only have a few minutes left. There's so many things interesting that are happening in Denver, but if you would summarize your comments to me. I know you're a member of our chief data officers network. It's a group that started with one, and then seven, and then 15, and then 30 chief data officers. So, yours is a little better resourced than some, but if you were going to give advice to your peers, what two or three principles would you pull out that would be of interest to them?
Paul Kresser:
From my experience, I think it's really important that you have to set a vision for one, and you have to lay out what you intend to accomplish. And it better be grounded in some sort of reality because we will all be facing challenges in limitations. So you have to enable to tell the story and show the success. You have to, obviously, make achievable goals and objectives for yourselves.
So, in other words, don't try to boil the ocean. We've invested heavily in our foundation in Denver. That's the underlying. It's the tools. It's the data platforms. It's the governance. Governance is huge here. Strong governance practices that, for us, are supported by executive orders. Invest in that, there will always be opportunities, there will always be a shiny object that gets flashed in front of us or anybody in this role. Try to separate that from, does it actually fit in with the vision and what we're trying to accomplish rather than try to get caught up in the hype of some of the newer technologies or some of the work that's getting done.
We all are dealing with limited resources. We have to focus them on where the return is greatest. And for us, we've determined that to be building our foundation, building our talent, providing the most appropriate tools to enable the type of data work that we want to see here in Denver.
Steve Goldsmith:
That's great. That's a great summary. Paul, some of the work you've done has been kind of codified legislatively. Which areas and how important is that?
Paul Kresser:
Yeah. We're fortunate here in Denver that some of the work we do is contained within executive order. Two, basically, the first being XO143, which is our information governance policy. And that provides citywide governance over all information in data. As part of that, created an information governance committee which creates and establishes the citywide strategic framework for managing particularly regulated data, policies, procedures, and the associated training for it. In my capacity as chief data officer, I'm a chair of the information governance committee. And my division, the data tools and governance division is an active participant and presenter at these meetings and really help drive the movement and the decisions of this body.
The second executive order that aids in the work we do is XO18, which is the executive order that establishes technology services as the citywide central IT department. And really, by definition within the executive order, any technology that touches the city's network core is the responsibility of technology services and technology services has the authority over that technology, including the data.
So, both of those XOs really help empower me and my organization to be able to really press the work we want to do, but obviously, the executive orders help from an authority perspective but the culture in Denver is what really has allowed us to make some huge achievements. And I think, and the culture I'm speaking of is very collaborative partnership we have with our agencies, we all recognize with our limited resources, we can achieve more together than in competition with each other. So, we focus on where the opportunity exists to partner and to collaborate together. And that's really, what's been able to drive some of our achievements.
Steve Goldsmith:
This is Steve Goldsmith, Professor of Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. We've had an opportunity today to talk to Paul about his role as chief data officer and the City of Denver and County of Denver's leadership in empowerment, employee empowerment, the use of data tools, very insightful suggestions for colleagues and either GIS or CD offices. Thank you so much, Paul, for your insights.
Paul Kresser:
My pleasure.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit our us at datasmartcities.org, or follow us @datasmartcities on Twitter. And remember to subscribe at the new Data-Smart City Podcast channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This podcast was produced by me, Betsy Gardner, and hosted by Professor Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to be the central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.