Introduction
In 2018, the City of South Bend sought to reimagine government transparency by inventorying data collected and stored by the city and developing an Open Data Portal to publish data on a departmental level. Ran through the Department of Innovation & Technology, Data Governance is a sustainable program to continuously inventory, publish, and improve data within the city to eventually be a leader in the space of enterprise data management.
The objectives of the Data Governance program are to understand the complete ecosystem of the city’s data in order to:
- Diagnose the current state of the published and unpublished data
- Identify gaps in current collection and management of data
- Use this information to improve data quality on a departmental level
Roles & Responsibilities
The Data Governance Program is led by the Department of Innovation and Technology and the Data Governance Committee with representatives from each department.
- Data Stewards are departmental representatives that sit on the Data Governance Committee and lead their department’s Data Inventory on an annual basis. The Steward is the person in the department with the highest knowledge of what data the department possesses.
- Data Custodians are subject matter experts for one or more datasets within each department. Custodians may coordinate with their department’s Steward to collect information about datasets that they work with on a regular basis.
Leadership
Denise Riedl | Chief Innovation Officer
David Finley | Director of Business Analytics
Timeline of the Data Governance Program
Data Governance | January – June
Representing each of the city’s departments, Data Stewards gather during the first half of each year to discuss current state and progress of Data Governance initiatives, including the status of the Data Inventory, Data Sharing Agreements, Open Data Policies, and more.
Data Improvement | July – December
During the second half of the year, DoIT analyzes the current state of each department’s data with the hopes of collaborating on a project to improve data collection, management, and interpretation. Each department will have a meeting with DoIT to determine department priorities.
