Data, Analytics and Innovation at The City of Calgary

Join us for insights into how The City of Calgary is embracing collaboration, engagement, data, analytics and innovation to drive continuous improvement in government. The end goal is to improve lives for all.

AnalyticsCalgary is a cross corporate program that champions and drives data decision making through intentional collaboration and connections. It is intended to build the foundation for using our data at The City of Calgary. The long-term vision is to move The Corporation towards making data-driven decisions in every aspect of the work that we do. There are four initiatives with a variety of outputs or deliverables and in this presentation we will focus on two: Open Data and Advanced Analytics.

Open Data is moving beyond transparency in government. Our new Open Data portal is truly a gateway for citizens, employees, councilors and app developers to leverage the data for their daily decision-making.

· For citizens it could have a community view: informing them of current traffic incidents they can avoid on their morning rush or census statistics on their community

· For employees, it’s promoting efficiency and accessibility to study trends and make predictive models

· For Council, it’s empowering them with data for evidence-based decision-making

· For app developers and researchers, it’s providing simplified access to data through the Socrata Open data Application Programming Interface (SODA) to enable quick development and deployment

Our portal offers stunning visualizations, mapping capabilities and developers to plug in and offers opportunities for community engagement to advance and continuously improve the lives of all through better access to products and services.

The Advanced Analytics initiative supports The City of Calgary in the data-driven decisions process by providing advanced tools and techniques for looking for, displaying and analyzing data. The group created a process that allows for the integration of data sources and viewers in the form of a Dashboard. These Corporate dashboards can help any group within the organization in monitoring and analyzing data available, using automated processes for daily content updates. In some cases, content updates are almost real-time. Part of the Analytics group researches and develops various modelling data analysis techniques – quite often to be used in conjunction with our Dashboards - layering data to find hidden insights that allow for the forecasting of events and behaviours.

Bios:

Janusz Gawor

Title: Open Data Strategist

Area of Focus: As an Open Data Strategist, Janusz collaborates enthusiastically across The Corporation to enable access to more data for employee and citizen benefit. Data is at the heart of decision-making and helps enable innovation. It can also build trust with the public through full disclosure, and helps drive the message home that government is interested in being transparent and accountable to its citizens.

Career History: With 13 years of municipal government experience, Janusz has focused on data analysis, research and continuous improvement in government. He seeks to build rapport and mutually beneficial relationships, in order to work together effectively to improve the lives of citizen. With a Science and IT background, Janusz has navigated and built his career in the organization. He has held data analyst and research liaison positions previously which have helped him grow his connections internally and externally. With a hungry appetite for information, he’s not afraid to research and tackle new challenges.

Herman Cardoso

Title: Leader, Information Analytics / Advanced Analytics Lead, Analytics Calgary Program

Area of Focus: As the Information Analytics Leader, Herman is focused on providing innovative solutions with the goal of enhancing efficiency and ensuring information we need for effective decision making is accessible and trust-worthy, enabling automated processes that support operational groups, pushing the boundaries of what the tools can do, bringing together business needs and innovative technical solutions that enhance the overall efficiency of the business processes. Herman and his team promote the use of dashboards integrating data sources and viewers, as well as researching on techniques of layering data for modeling and predictive analytics.

Career history: Herman received undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering from the Industrial University of Santander, Colombia, and started his career as a Software Developer before moving to Operations Management in the manufacturing sector. In 2002, Herman moved to Calgary and continued in Operations Management for the service sector while completing his MBA at the University of Calgary. He joined the City of Calgary in 2012.