If You’re Trying to Transform Your Citizen Experience Without Good Data, You’re Just Guessing

Improving the Citizen Experience through Data

In the public sector, data is key to transforming both citizen experiences and employee experiences, and making those transformations has proven to increase efficiency and productivity by a factor of ten.

However, just amassing data doesn’t automatically create those types of results. Data needs to be treated like the valuable asset that it is. It’s more than just numbers and stats. Data – when collected properly, well organized, accessible and understandable to everyone who needs it, and actionable – is a powerful tool that can improve the lives of citizens.

The Critical Role of Data in the Public Sector

In both the public sector and the private sector, data is the backbone of solid decision-making. Specific to government agencies, data can lead to smarter decisions that drive economic prosperity, enhance education systems, and build public trust through transparency.

Driving Economic Prosperity

States have a duty to foster economic growth for their citizens, and data can help agencies make more informed decisions regarding where and how to allocate resources to create, increase, and sustain this prosperity.

And the insights gained from this data doesn’t only help the state make better decisions, it also helps businesses make better decisions about the state. For example, site selectors, real estate brokers, and corporate executives use workforce, transportation, education, infrastructure, and real estate data provided by states to inform decisions on where to locate new facilities.

Here in Ohio, two recent such decisions are already making huge positive impacts on the State’s economy.

• The recent decision by Honda and LG Energy Solution to invest $4.4 billion to build an EV battery facility in Jeffersonville, Ohio, is expected to create approximately 2,200 jobs.
• Intel has committed to investing $20 billion to begin manufacturing microchips in New Albany, Ohio. These new facilities are expected to employ over 3,000 people.

Labor and infrastructure data are informing these types of decisions all across the country. Both Gotion’s 2023 announcement of a $2 billion electric vehicle battery factory in Illinois (expected to create 2,500+ jobs), and Topsoe’s 2024 investment of $400 million to produce clean hydrogen in Virginia (expected to create ~150 jobs) were influenced by the data collected and provided by the respective local communities in recruiting high-tech manufacturers.

Enhancing Education Systems

One of the most important things a state does is help educate their children. Data plays a big part in making meaningful improvements in various ways to enhance educational systems. Some examples include monitoring student performance and progress and signaling early warning signs, optimizing resource allocation and budgeting, improving curriculum and instruction, informing policy development and evaluation, integrating technology and more.

These strategies help states make informed decisions, allocate resources effectively, and implement initiatives that improve educational outcomes, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to succeed and reach their full potential.

For example, Kentucky has focused on aggregating data through initiatives like the SEEK project to improve its State Report Card. This data is used to ensure that every student has equal opportunities to develop their potential by allocating funds appropriately. Additionally, the state utilizes this data to streamline the process for school systems applying for necessary resources.

Building Public Trust through Transparency

Citizens expect government agencies to be transparent, without it, there is often skepticism. By sharing data openly, agencies can increase accountability and build trust.

In Ohio, every state agency has been tasked with contributing data to DataOhio, a platform designed to provide transparency by offering public access to statewide datasets. Public-facing dashboards present Ohio’s citizens with data on topics like behavioral health, healthcare access, and housing needs – all of which can inform the decisions they make.

However, transparency is about more than just making mass amounts of data available. It’s also about ensuring that citizens can easily access and understand that data. The true value of data lies in its ability to inform and empower citizens, legislators, and government employees.

Data Could be Doing Even More to Improve Public Services and Citizen Engagement

States across the country are leveraging better data collection and usage to help their citizens and businesses. Here are just a few examples of initiatives states are investigating and executing.

• Tax Questions Answered by Chatbots: Citizens could get their tax questions answered via chatbots, eliminating long hold times and improving satisfaction.
• Home Buyers Making Informed Decisions: Prospective home buyers could easily search school rankings, local taxes, crime rates, property values, and other data to enable them to make informed decisions about where to live.
• Access to Support Programs: Individuals and organizations could effortlessly search for federal or state support programs, helping them find the assistance they need without navigating bureaucratic red tape.
• Election Transparency: Greater transparency in election data could build trust in the electoral process.
• Veteran Benefits: Streamlining data related to veteran benefits could ensure that those who served our country receive the support they deserve promptly and efficiently.

Improving Public Services through Data isn’t Exclusive to States

Data can be and has also been used at the local level to address concerns and needs specific to that town, showing us how data can help us create smarter cities.

As part of North Carolina’s Overdose Prevention Plan, instead of just monitoring overdose statistics, town officials in Cary, NC, worked with healthcare officials and educators to monitor opioid levels within the sewer system. They then used that data to better gauge where in the town intervention was needed. Besides using it to battle opioid use, Cary and other cities also utilized this strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This solution isn’t the only example of Cary being a data-driven smart city. The town has also created a central data portal that covers areas such as planning, leisure, environmental, and geographic information. This data helps city officials, businesses, residents, visitors, and more.

Across the country – in the city of Salinas, California – the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) uses 24 different data points ranging from crime rates and gang activity, to socioeconomic information and school performance, to better create targeted strategies and intervention programs that have reduced youth violence by over 60% – as well as similar drops in youth homicides, suspensions, expulsions, and arrests – in the last decade-plus.

More Data Isn’t the Answer – the Right Data Is

While agencies and departments of every size and type are collecting more data than ever before, much of that data is providing far less value than it could be.

Sometimes, the data is simply flawed because of how it was gathered, organized, mined, analyzed, or interpreted. Even more likely, the issue isn’t that the data is incorrect; it’s that the data isn’t the exact data the decision-makers need. And often, this happens because agencies are just gathering as much data as they can without any real plan. Gathering vast amounts of data without a clear purpose leads to inefficiency.

A 2021 survey by Gartner found that not only could bad data cost an organization upwards of $13 million per year, but that 60% of organizations weren’t even measuring that impact, so they had no way to know how much their bad data was actually costing them.

Make Your Public Sector Data More Useful

Improving the Citizen Experience through data is about collecting the right data, and then making that data meaningful, accessible, and actionable.

Here are four key steps to ensuring you’re collecting, using, and sharing data to maximize the Citizen Experience in your state or city.

Research Citizen Needs: By uncovering what citizens and businesses truly need to know, states can build their datasets around these actual needs, ensuring that the information they provide is relevant and helpful. It’s equally important to uncover how citizens can most easily find, access, process, and manipulate the data you are collecting and sharing.

During this research be careful to not focus on only the needs of your individual citizens; the data needs and usage of your state’s businesses are equally important. For example, researchers, news outlets, and site-selection consultants may use well over 100 different metrics to measure a state’s potential for business. It’s clear that the more accurate and accessible a state’s data is, the better their opportunities are.

Choose the Right Tools: Tools like Snowflake or Informatica can help manage data sharing with appropriate stakeholders. These platforms allow for efficient data integration and sharing, making it easier for agencies to collaborate and serve citizens effectively. And by using tools like Power BI to create dashboards to visualize data, states can make it easier for citizens and government employees to understand and act on the information.

The DataOhio example mentioned earlier is an example of this challenge. While the concept is promising, and the platform is filled with valuable information, the Citizen Experience could be improved through dashboarding to make the data more accessible and actionable, which would enable citizens to benefit even more from this data-rich tool.

Establish Data Governance: Implementing robust data governance practices is essential for keeping data clean, organized, accessible, and usable.

Unfortunately, data is often either locked away in silos or presented in a way that’s difficult for the average citizen to find, understand, or use. Creating and following data guidelines and mandates solve this issue.

Use AI to Clean Up Your Data: Artificial intelligence can help clean and organize data, making it more reliable and actionable.

While every state, agency, and department has its own unique AI policies and rules that must be followed, agencies can use artificial intelligence within those protocols to accelerate data quality improvements that include executing queries to check data quality, profiling data to identify anomalies, and building faster pipelines to gather the right data.

Let’s Get Your Citizen Experience Transformation Started

There are so many ways you can enhance the Citizen Experience with your data. Ready to take the first steps toward a more data-driven, citizen-focused future? Let’s talk.