Need to Transform City Services
At DataSF, our mission is to empower use of data. But when City data is locked into cumbersome backends, it’s not empowering, it’s exhausting. :-(
Much of that City data is the digital exhaust of a service or interaction with a resident, business or visitor (e.g. filing for a permit, getting a parking pass, paying a ticket). Data can help transform those services by identifying what residents want and how we can improve our services.
Unfortunately, the experience of City services can often feel as cumbersome as our backends. That’s why we were so excited to be part of the working group that helped write and launch San Francisco’s Digital Services Strategy to transform our services in the modern age.
A New Role in SF: Chief Digital Services Officer
A key piece of the strategy is strong, experienced central leadership with a new role to support it: the CDSO. From our strategy: “San Francisco needs an empowered, trusted leader to implement the strategy and guide our service redesign efforts. A dedicated, experienced thought-leader will be a change-agent who drives a culture shift towards user centered thinking and brings a modern technology approach to digital products at the City.”
We are looking for a leader who can not only manage a portfolio of digital services but also set the City up to deliver quality services at scale.
The Missing Data Middle
Data services and infrastructure will be part of that scaling. At DataSF, we are excited to have a partner to work with to build out our nascent data services and infrastructure layer. Data as a service in the City will:
- Decrease development time and costs
- Increase access to data for analytics and planning
- Ultimately lead to better decisions and services
We envision co-building this data services and infrastructure layer to include:
- A connectors and transport layer across our federated data backends
- Sources and repositories for open data, streaming data and specialized stores
- A services layer including API gateways and management, messaging and geo services and a metadata platform
All of this will make it easier and faster to build applications, discover and access data for planning and analytics and empower real-time understanding of programs and services
Help us design and develop the data infrastructure in San Francisco to fuel both great services and great decisions!