In May, Holm — who was concurrently senior technology adviser to Mayor Eric Garcetti — was named the city’s chief data officer. She served as adviser and CDO until November, when she was named deputy mayor for budget and innovation, overseeing the city’s annual budgeting process as well as the mayor’s plans to bridge the digital divide and engineer the city’s fiscal recovery from the pandemic.
“The work has been around trying to build a better understanding of how to create technologies that are focused on all of our residents and businesses; are useable and accessible to people across a lot of different spectrums; and that provide meaningful support and services in a way that lets lots of people have a hand in how the government is run,” said Holm.
A key initiative is the Angeleno Card, designed to aid COVID-impacted households but also offering a single sign-on across city services that enables contactless connections to city government and even includes a banking component. A bellwether project was the option of remote work for agents at the city’s 311 call center; Holm ran, effectively, a pilot of the strategy in 2019, which helped ease the challenge of going remote en masse last spring. The city is also working to increase its network capacity and bring high-speed broadband into public housing, free for six months and discounted afterward.
The pandemic, Holm said, has hastened roughly “five or six years of IT acceleration” in a year — prompting a re-examination of online services, an e-payment consolidation and partnering with governments including San Jose, Calif., on issues like an eviction moratorium. The city’s Digital Bill of Rights and its Code of Ethics are due to be released this winter.
