 Live from the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and the Information Quality Symposium. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Paul Gillan. Welcome back. This is theCUBE at the MIT CDO IQ Conference. Paul Gillan here with Stu Miniman, and you know, we're all about busting myths here at theCUBE, and so let's bust a couple more. We're joined here today by the CDO of the City of Syracuse, New York. Myth number one is that you have to be an old guy to be a CDO. Our guest is 31 years old. Myth number two is that you have to have an IT background or a heavy technical background. Our guest, Sam Edelstein, has been, among other things, a newspaper reporter, an English teacher, and a social media manager, but now getting a master's degree in information management, so clearly the tech does count for something, but it's not necessarily the required requirement for the job. Sam, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I want to ask you first about a tweet you posted recently called, why Pokemon Go is the future of city, will change urban planning forever? I've been trying to get used to Pokemon Go the last couple of days. I can't quite get into the habit of it. Why do you have this disruptive view? Well, I think I tuned out for a minute, and then all of a sudden it was all the rage and bigger than Twitter, and so. A week ago. And I'm walking around downtown Syracuse, and I see a couple of people walking around and about to walk into a road because they're playing Pokemon Go, and so I figured if it keeps on growing like that, we're gonna have to plan for how people are gonna be walking. I've even seen some tweets about people posting signs that say that don't Pokemon and drive or something like that, so I may have to keep that in mind. One more reason to be distracted only now. That's right. We're not just a threat on the roads, we're a threat on the sidewalks as well. That's right, that's right. You came about this job rather circuitous route. And this is the first CDO job the city has had. Maybe you can talk about why the position was created and what about it appealed to you to be the canary in the coal mine, if you were. Yeah, so I think my background, I've always been interested in using data in a variety of different ways, even if it wasn't sort of the main job responsibility, it was informing me of the ways that I was doing my work. And so I knew the importance of it, whether I was thinking about what's the most effective way to market an organization on social media or I worked for Syracuse University in our alumni office and thinking about what's the best way to use our data, plan events to figure out which events might work best or how to reach people in the best way, how to email people in the best way. So then when I came to work for the city of Syracuse, had the same attitude coming in, the job that I came in doing was much more data heavy and just realized that we didn't have easy access to all that data. So talked about how that could be built more and more and more. And I think as some of the administration also realized that that was something that they wanted to get more into and that being a city that has limited funds, we need to be smart about the decisions that we're making, it became apparent that this was the type of job that would be needed so that someone could think sort of globally about what data is out there and where does it need to be combined so that we can make the best decisions for the city. So Sam, can you help us understand? What's the reporting structure that you have there and was that kind of, is there a formal mandate? You were talking a little bit about there. What do they see as kind of the, how do they know that you've succeeded in your job? Yeah, that's a good question. That's my boss about that. So we have an office of innovation that was actually funded about a year and a half ago by Bloomberg Philanthropies. There are innovation offices in 19 cities across the world and Syracuse is lucky enough to have one of them. So that's originally how I came on board. Now I'm much more a part of the sort of formal city structure but I work within that office with the thought being that we are an office that sort of serves as a consulting, internal consulting firm to the city. So we're sort of thinking globally about all things. We aren't just within one silo. And so we go around and sort of take on different problems and think about how to solve them and it's all very data driven. So I think it makes sense for me to be there. In terms of success, our office is very much metric driven so we're thinking about the changes that are being made. Have they been impactful sort of from outcome basis instead of an output basis? So are we saving dollars? Are we giving a better product to our citizens? Even if it's just, it's not how many roads are we paving is like overall our people having a smoother drive on the streets. And so thinking about that, I think then my role is ensuring that we know about the data that we have and that there are some things that are less data driven, I guess, but thinking when people are deciding about things, are they thinking about it from the data that they have or are they just making gut reactions to it? And so part of it I think is just talking about some of that culture within the city. In the keynote this morning, Tom Davenport talked about a CDO needs to have a balance of offense and defense. How does that resonate with you and how do you look at that from your job? Yeah, for sure. Right now I think a lot of it is getting a, just a grasp of what's going on in general and so there are certainly places where we probably need some work on just having a good sense of what's out there so that we can play a good defense and to figure out where there might be threats to some of the data security. And I'm not sure that we know all of that quite yet, but additionally I think there is a lot of room to just, there's a lot of low hanging fruit where we could say, why do we make this decision? There isn't a whole bunch of reasoning behind it sometimes and so, but there is data that we can use and so thinking about how do we use that data to make better decisions, there are opportunities all over the place and sometimes the struggle is like figuring out which one do you focus on first. You've only been in the job five months, the job's only five months old and you're coming in fresh like this, was anything surprise you about what you found? I think I had a sense about that there would be siloed data and that it would be messy data but some of the ways that it is organized is surprising. I think it's not always easy to figure out which address we're talking about if you're looking at our neighborhood office versus our zoning office versus 911 versus all these different places, we could be referring to the same piece of land in a different way, it's a data quality issue for sure and that's something that has been worked on and just needs to continue to be worked on. What's some of the potential that you see as you look at these silos, you look and start trying to harmonize them, bring them together, get people sharing, what is some of the immediate potential that you see? So one of the mayor's top priorities and one of the things that she talks about a ton is infrastructure problems. The city has water mains that break all the time, hundreds of times a year, potholes throughout the city, roads are deteriorating, sewers are in trouble, which is a common issue for cities across the country and really across the world. That data though lives in silos so we may know where our potholes are and we may know where our water main breaks are but that hasn't always been combined and then so we'll go into a project to repave a road but we didn't look at how many water main breaks there have been underneath that road in the last 10 years. So working to combine that together and getting a sense of like what's the overall risk to this road and where does it make sense to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it takes to repave and to redo an entire road, reconstruct an entire road. There's not that many hundreds of thousands of dollars to go around and so making sure that you make a good choice about which one you're gonna take on is really important and if you don't, you spend $100,000 repaving a road and then a water main blows up. It's not all for naught but there's definitely, the road loses some of its life span and so that is obviously a problem in terms of the way that we can best deliver some services. So warehousing some of that data, making sure that we're looking at it critically so that when our public works department is thinking about where they're going to do work, we're getting all the underground infrastructure fixed first if there's problems there so that we don't repave a road and then have problems later on. We've heard from the federal government people at the event here that the impacts and ramifications of the open data mandate, how does that impact what you're doing and I'd also like to understand how security fits into your job role and what you do with data. So open data is really interesting and I'm a big supporter of the concept of it. The city hasn't taken that on as a mandate itself yet but I think that's something that we are thinking about and potentially working towards. The benefit of it though, we use federal data and state data all the time to help inform some of our work or sometimes we don't have information because it hasn't been collected, it's on paper that there are other agencies that have collected in some way. So like traffic counts in New York State, they're on the New York State data portal and so open data portal and so we can see where the heaviest traffic is in our city from that's being measured every single year, maybe not as detailed as what we would collect but we don't collect it in the same way so it's there. So there's a lot of value to us from other levels of government having open data and so I think that then makes sense to me to think about like how could our data help to benefit other levels of government or businesses in the city, just residents who are interested. We have great university in our city who is full of researchers who do research in other cities that have opened up their data. I'd love it if they did that research in our city. You raise a great point which is about open data which is one thing to have the data open, that's great but how do you find it? How do you know that the data is out there? Do you have a means whether it's a, whether you network with other CDOs of other cities or is there an organization or some kind of a database where you can find out what's available to you? Yeah, so I mean the portals generally you can search them but I think one of the problems that, I don't know if it's a problem but one of the issues that I think often gets called out is like okay you release the data but is anyone actually using it and then what are they using it for? And so I guess my attitude as we go forward thinking about how would we open up data is I think it's important to be transparent and thinking about it that way but then also thinking about it in a demand driven sort of way where we'd say maybe this is how we sort of first release first data sets is if there are businesses that are saying we would be able to grow our business if we had this sort of data that might be a key data set to release. And I think thinking about which data sets are gonna be used the most is a good way to think about what you should invest time cleaning and making sure that there's good descriptions about that data and all of that. So Sam, the security question I guess how does that fit into your role? Yeah, I mean it's important. I'm not sure that we've totally gotten there yet. There are certainly a lot of security issues that come up globally. Our IT department deals with making sure that we have all sorts of lockdowns on our computers within the organization but I think going forward as we think about releasing data we aren't going to release live crime data that's showing exactly where crime was committed the second before. So but there is probably also a amount of time that can go by and some anonymization that can be put on that data where it still makes sense to release it with the right sort of security checks in place. So I don't know exactly what that is and I think it's just something that we are going to go forward and think about in consultation with our law department, looking at best practices from other cities. There are other cities who have figured a lot of this out and so looking to them to sort of guide us I think can be really useful. Have you selected platforms that you will use as you take this data and try to harmonize it? Sort of, not really. I mean a lot of it, we, a lot of our organizations use Microsoft products to sort of do their analysis. We have other payroll software where we do hold it, SQL server databases that hold a lot of our data but in terms of how we would present it, no we haven't totally gotten it yet. I think that's part of what I've been working on is thinking about how do we, what are the best ways to visualize it? How much of it is us internally coding, visualizations so that we're doing it on our own versus procuring software to do it for us. Almost out of time here, but I have to ask you this question. You're 31 years old, you look 18. You're working in government which has a lot of very long time employees. Has it been an issue with you, someone with your youth influencing people who've been around a lot longer than you? Yeah, I think so. There are times when I'll say, that's not what the data says and people don't like that very much. But I think it's a good check for me to think about, let's make sure that the analysis is really correct and then let's talk about how you might, how does this data help to support your job already and how does it maybe make it easier? So we had an issue where we were considering our budgeting for a certain project that we were doing. We said it costs $30 a square yard to do this thing. Really didn't after looking at the analysis and where there was money left over every year. So we looked at that, figured out where, why is this money not being spent, essentially? And it turned out it was actually like $25 a square yard to do the project. So that actually saves the, well it doesn't save any money, but it allows them to do more work than they would have done before. So this was a department that I had. Some disagreements with in terms of how we use, how we should be using data for some of the projects that we do and I think that's the sort of way that, then I said, hey you can do one more project this year because there's this sort of identified savings. So I try to do it that way, it's not always perfect, but I think there is some understanding that like, this is an appointed position from the mayor and so she's interested in being more data driven as well and so if I can go in and push for that, sometimes gently, sometimes not as much, hopefully it can be effective, but that's definitely part of the learning curve as well. Sam Edelstein, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. It's great to see someone with your youth, your passion, your vigor for the job. I'm sure government could use more people like you. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks, I appreciate it. We'll be back with our next guest in a minute.