Telling a good story is not the priority.
It’s the side effect.
Successfully applying data and technology in government is hard work. Telling a good story about these applications is just as challenging.
“What makes a good data story?” does not interest me.
“What makes a successful data project?” interests me.
“How do successful data teams operate?” interests me.
“How do we perpetually sustain good government?” interests me.
A good data story
A good story doesn’t care about the tech or the tools.
It cares about the people that “led the effort”;
The politician that got credit for it;
Or the organization that wrote about it.
A good data story has just the right amount of buzzwords.
It will fit into a 1,000 word blog post (like this one),
Regardless of the underlying project’s value or effectiveness.
A good data story is about using machine learning,
In the form of advanced neural networks,
Across data gathered by a $5 million innovative sensor array,
That stores the data in a Hadoop cluster,
To determine how many drones just flew by.
Yet, nobody asked how many drones just flew by.
A good data story chases talking points — and forgets to solve a problem that matters.
Sorry, that’s not interesting.
A good data project
A good data project identifies a problem that is worth solving.
It requires that city staff across departments work together;
Means building buy-in for data access and process change;
And accounts for regulations that are decades old.
A good data project is about details,
The right technical approach to create the right solution,
And the process change that influences the right outcome.
A good data project is about the Streets engineers who spent years understanding street paving,
So they can spend 20 hours explaining their processes to the data scientists,
Who will to figure out how to run Python on our legacy servers,
So that the front-end developers can provide a usable interface to street paving analysis,
And the program manager who championed the project can implement it operationally.
A good data team
A good data team builds relationships with employees across all city disciplines;
They use design thinking techniques to identify hard problems;
And make disciplined technology choices to deliver the right solution.
They save countless hours for Streets engineers,
By helping them them auto-generate reports.
They analyze historical data and inform dispatch configurations for Fire/EMS,
Helping doctors make the case for adjusting dispatch plans.
They evaluate fleet vehicle GPS movement and propose new routing patterns for delivery trucks,
Allowing for more efficient movement of materials between city offices.
They build Police dispatchers a real-time dashboard with emergency call hold times,
By installing a Firefox plugin.
A good government
The aforementioned projects are impactful;
Cost almost nothing;
And will likely never see a press release.
We’re okay with that.
We will tell our story to the people that benefited from our work:
The street engineer who will now save time running reports.
The truck driver that spends less time in traffic, completing deliveries faster.
The dispatcher who will more effectively take calls, saving more lives.
We are not here to tell good data stories.
We are here to do good work.
We are here for good government.
