The History of Data Visualization in Louisville Metro Government: Journey to Power BI
Many governments grapple with how to effectively drive decisions using data. Even when instances of data-driven decision-making occurs, how does this process permeate throughout the organization’s culture? Power BI has helped Louisville Metro Government with these data issues, and is now our enterprise business intelligence tool to visualize and analyze data.
Currently all employees have access to the free Power BI desktop and dozens have inexpensive Pro licenses enabling them to publicly publish their dashboards. You can see examples on our Open Data Platform embedded with the raw data that is driving the dashboard (Fire Incidents, Fire Damage, Salaries). To support the roll-out, we launched our Data Academy to teach employees how to use the software. We’ve also integrated with our IT department so employees can also submit tickets to the Helpdesk in order to troubleshoot issues.
How did we get here? Let’s detail the three year journey to making Power BI an enterprise tool, building the culture and support for it, and offer some best practices and lessons learned for cities interested in a similar outcome.
The Need for a Tool
Back in early 2016, employees of Civic Innovation and Technology (CIT) were chatting about the needs that kept organically arising for data visualization tools.
The idea for a tool arose out of casual conversation and curiosity: “wouldn’t it be cool if….?” and “how can we take the enterprise key performance indicators (KPIs) to the next level?”
The search started by identifying what tools were already available and in use — mainly Excel and Tableau among others. Mike Reynolds, a CIT database administrator, started playing around with Power BI Desktop, a new, free tool from Microsoft.
Big Data Challenge: Waze Data
We started exploring business intelligence solutions, like Power BI, because we had a data challenge a spreadsheet tool just could not tackle. Through the “Waze for Cities” program (previously CCP), the city had access to millions of rows of Waze data on traffic jams and was trying to figure out the best way to understand and process the data.
This became the city’s first project in Power BI, and remains one of the most complex dashboards built to date.
Ed Blayney, Civic Technology Manager, reflects that “this proves that the challenges you take on dictate the skills that you build.”
The complexity of the data and the new technology required a team approach. Reynolds built a processor and a path to a server for the data. Mary Hampton, Senior Data Scientist, used her extensive knowledge of statistics to create context around the analysis and start playing with appropriate visualizations. Blayney and Hampton spent many rounds working with the city’s traffic team to understand their needs and requirements in order to build a meaningful project.
Factoring in user requirements was key — in the words of Reynolds, “Once you started doing [Power BI], does it give you actual information? Can you do something with the output and make a decision?”
The project was challenging — first there was sifting through hundreds of pages of JSON to understand what the variables were, understanding the nuances of the data specification, figuring out what types of visualizations and filters were useful, learning how to convert units, and understanding what metrics were significant.
By the end of 2016, we had a working real-time database and some good tools for the traffic team (read our blog post). Later we released this as open source cloud code called Waze WARP for any city to use and connect to Power BI.
Through this first foray into Power BI, Blayney notes, “we learned a lot of things and it has benefited the organization in the long-term.”
Navigating Barriers and Gaining Acceptance
In 2017 as data and technology become more entrenched in the way that Louisville Metro does business, so grew the requests for niche software to visualize individual department data. Rather than pursue multiple individual contracts, Chris Seidt, Director of Civic Innovation and Technology, pushed employees to identify an enterprise tool that the department could showcase to other departments as a cheaper alternative.
Power BI quickly emerged as a leading contender. Other options, such as Tableau, had costly price tags and would limit the number of potential users. Others tested, such as Metabase, were web-based and open-source, which meant it would require its own login system, data pipeline, and hosting costs.
Institutional Support and Costs
Still, by 2018 the road to implementation still came with some roadblocks. Michael Schnuerle, Chief Data Officer, worked with South Bend, Indiana, to understand how they were able to obtain individual licenses for Power BI Pro, rather than upgrade Metro’s enterprise contract with Microsoft. The licensing alone took six months to negotiate, but now we have Pro licenses on an individual basis for around $120/year. At the end of 2018, we paid for the first 20 people, selected based on their skills, interest, and job responsibilities, to get on Pro to help drive adoption.
Importantly, new pathways and processes were created in CIT in order to allow Power BI to be pushed to every computer in our network and employees were now able to manage monthly updates directly without having to open tickets with CIT. Institutional support is important to long-term sustainability.
As Blayney notes, “Making it an enterprise tool is where you get the innovation to stick.”
Socialization and Training
We realized the other key to getting this innovation to stick was to empower and up-skill employees with targeted training. Through the financial support of CIT and the Office of Performance Improvement (OPI) via the Enterprise Training Fund, two training opportunities were funded.
- August 2018 — through a collaboration with GovEx, which offered 3 days worth of on-site training in Power BI and other data tools for 30 Data Governance employees.
- April 2019 — a local company called Tandem offered a discounted price for 3 days worth of training in Power BI, which offered over 60 employees the chance to develop foundational and intermediate skills in Power BI.
This helped kick-start wider adoption of the tool and level-set employees. Along with setting up internal IT support, we started to train our employees how to use the tool and set up our Data Academy around our enterprise data analysis tools: Excel and Power BI. Samara Angel, an OPI intern, created the curriculum materials with feedback from Michael, Ed, Austin Chitwood and Rebecca Hollenbach. Rebecca taught all the courses for 93 employees so far.
- August 2019 — launched the Data Academy offering a series of courses in Power BI and data visualization, including topics of data quality, data cleaning, and dashboarding best practices.
Ed, Michael, and Rebecca created an internal SharePoint website that includes how to get started with Power BI, resources and training available, and a robust FAQ and knowledge base for all the common questions and technical hurdles people have faced.
Widespread Enterprise Adoption
Leveraging our mature Data Governance team, we ran hackathons using the Waze data, and had a group learning session for employees with current Power BI projects to come pitch ideas and receive feedback.
Once Power BI became a core part of our enterprise and culture, other departments and initiatives started using it. For example, Power BI became the visualization tool used for LouieStat forums in 2019. Although the set-up is initially more work, those who prepare the forum materials are happier with how much quicker the process is through Power BI in the long-term. And we have the opportunity to now automate data flows and publish the KPIs online with Pro.
Due to our deliberate roll-out plan, our employees have hit the ground running, finding insights into their previously untapped data and improving data quality at the source. Louisville Fire, Louisville Metro Police, Facilities and Fleet, and Public Works have all created dashboards that their leadership regularly uses internally. And they have even replaced some of niche business intelligence tools with Power BI saving our government tens of thousands of dollars.
As Reynolds says, “It keeps on growing; with the training we’re trying to foster an environment for growth.”
Cost Savings
In addition to operational improvements in data workflows, dashboarding, leadership communication, and data quality, the use of Power BI has led to specific cost savings. Here are a few examples that we will add to in the future.
1. The Louisville Fire Department replaced their Fire specific business intelligence tool with the more robust Power BI, for a cost savings of $10,000 per year. Captain Williams created a tool to provide leadership an operational dashboard to monitor individual units’ performance.
2. When our public Salary Explorer tool reached its end of life and needed a replacement, we built a new one with more functionality on top of our salary open dataset. This saved about 20 hours of employee time and eliminated the need to pay for a custom solution.
3. The Parking Authority is looking at Power BI to cohesively visualize its data stored across multiple vendor and internal systems, instead of paying a company tens of thousands of dollars for a solution. When this is complete we will post an update here.
Future Steps
Goals for the future include continuing to saturate departments with employees trained in Power BI through our Data Academy and Data Governance work. Additionally, there are goals to further automate data extraction from source systems for Power BI. And we are working on embed more visualizations on the Open Data portal for each dataset by using our data experts in departments to publish with their Pro licenses.
Externally, we will be bringing our Power BI Data Academy course to the public at international Open Data Day this year, allowing anyone to attend for free and learn the tool.
Learn From Us — how your city can do this too
1. Understand your current environment
It is important to understand the context that you’re working in. What are ways to seamlessly integrate a new software? How do software processes currently work with IT? What data visualization systems are already in place? Are there important projects you can leverage to demonstrate the benefits and cost and time savings? Do you have champions who will highlight the tool, and power users who will propel usage forward in the organization?
2. Leverage internal talent
Schnuerle emphasizes that “people outside the government don’t realize- there’s a lot of latent talent.” Find those who are talented and curious in the city, and let them run with the tool.
3. Lower barriers to adoption
A key component to making Power BI an enterprise tool was to make it easy and accessible to download and update the software. The software comes at no cost, and employees can do the work themselves. If they do get stuck, your IT department should be able to help them troubleshoot.
4. Have a plan for implementation
Understand how you will implement the system and how it fits into your current data and software context. Be prepared to map out who owns which parts of the process, and how training and socialization will roll out.
5. Increase awareness and give employees opportunities to test it out
Create dedicated training and events where employees can see how the tool works, be inspired by projects from their peers, get advice from others, and advance their professional development.
Get In Touch!
This story was drafted by Rebecca Hollenbach and includes interviews with staff members conducted by her, with assistance from Ed Blayney and Michael Schnuerle. Thanks to Joseph Lord for additional edits. You can reach us through our website or on social media.
