The event, titled, “Data Management in the 21st Century: Thinking holistically about delivering digital services to the populace,” featured Dessa Gypalo, chief data officer for the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology; Kathryn Darnall Helms, chief data officer for the state of Oregon; and Robert McGough, chief analytics officer at Arkansas Department of Information Systems. Katya Abazajian, director of programs with the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, moderated the panel.
As Gypalo explained, it is important for those in government to think about data technology from the point of view of a service provider, and not just as one who provides services for agencies or programs, but for the end user who will benefit from those things.
“Centering the human experience in the work that we do tends to take it out of technology and data speak, which can be intimidating, and takes it more down to that human-centered level of ‘We’re all working together to solve this gnarly challenge.’”
However, she also noted that while data does provide information, data alone also does not tell a whole story, because the context is key.
Part of providing that necessary context is having the metadata — data that provides information about other data — to shape the narrative.
Darnall Helms explained that when government agencies provide open data to increase transparency, those who made that data public can sometimes lose control of the narrative that it tells. By including metadata, government agencies can help provide context.
McGough also noted the importance of communicating the meaning of data sets, including particular data fields to the data stewards, explaining that ambiguity can lead to misunderstanding, and consequentially, poor data management.
Beyond the importance of including metadata to provide the context for the story a particular data set tells, government agencies should also be intentional in collecting the “right data” to tell the story, as Gypalo noted.
Abazajian defined data equity as the idea of better managing data by disaggregating it by demographic characteristics and paying attention to who may be over-represented or under-represented in order for governments and other people using the data to better understand where the greatest needs are.
While states may have different approaches to data equity strategies, McGough said federal agencies are putting out their own policies, highlighting the Department of Labor’s Enterprise Data Strategy that focuses on two goals, one of which is equity.
Darnall Helms noted that data equity work involves not only questioning how data is being analyzed, but also how it is being collected. For the state of Oregon, it involves collaborating with other state agencies to understand best practices in data equity and implement them on a wider scale rather than having that work be siloed.
“It’s a separate initiative, but really, if we’re doing it well, equity is a consideration as we consider data quality,” she said.
Gypalo echoed this sentiment, clarifying that her data team is not an analytics team, and that for Illinois, effectively managing data from an equity context involves working with agencies, departments and programs throughout the state. As she stated, it’s not only one department or team’s challenge to solve, but one that involves collaboration between many stakeholders.
