Maryland’s data lead reflects on ongoing ‘culture shift’
Amy Sparwasser via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
Natalie Evans Harris, the state’s chief data officer, said that, while sharing data can be difficult, centralizing it where possible can help agencies work together and make more holistic decisions.
Data-driven decision making and data sharing have been major points of emphasis for Maryland under the past two governors, and its chief data officer said that has required a big “culture shift.”
First initiated under former Gov. Larry Hogan and continued under current Gov. Wes Moore, the state has looked to break down data siloes and share data better between agencies. That way, its Chief Data Officer Natalie Evans Harris said, state agencies can make more holistic decisions and connect residents with more services that they are eligible for.
“If you're talking about housing, you're not just looking at it from the housing available for individuals, but also the education and the workforce development and the other pieces that are necessary to keep an individual in a house and in a home,” Evans Harris said during the Elastic Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. last week. “When you think about workforce development and employment, are they getting those other pieces and those wrap-around services that tend to be tied to other sectors? It all needs to come together if you truly want to use data to address mission problems.”
Getting agencies to work more closely together and share data has taken a “culture shift” that is still ongoing, Evans Harris said. And that culture shift is primarily focused on creating an environment and a centralized governance structure where agencies feel comfortable sharing data and using it.
While there will always be certain datasets that agencies cannot share for various reasons — whether that be because of using personally identifiable information or because of statutory limitations — it is a “risk decision” that ultimately, they should take to make services better.
“What we're really working towards is creating a data sharing environment that allows agencies to plug into [it] fairly easily, and we will take care of the governance and the flow of the data and the sharing of that data,” Evans Harris said.
Having a centralized approach for data management and governance will also allow agencies to worry less about those tasks themselves, she said.
“It's data that's already been tagged and allowable for sharing across states,” Evans Harris said. “If we make it easier for that data to flow in a centralized place, that takes the burden off of the agencies and allows them to then focus on what are the things that are specific and unique to their environment and their situations.”
The Maryland Department of Information Technology released an IT master plan last year that included a nod to its efforts to “serve the whole state” with centralized infrastructure, data and platforms in a bid to improve governmental efficiency.
“Previous data efforts were primarily focused on geographic information system (GIS) data; in the last year, we have initiated new efforts around data literacy across State government, facilitating cross-agency data sharing, and providing enterprise data management and visualization tools through our new enterprise data platform,” the master plan says. “Not only do these new areas of focus better meet the needs of our agency customers, they also embody the new centralization approach of providing services with economies of scale that address shared agency demand.”
Data literacy is a key component of that centralization effort and culture shift, Evans Harris said. It allows better training on data and how to engage with it, as well as understanding the pros, cons, risks and considerations of using it. It’s adaptable too, as some employees will want to learn how to use it at a granular level, others will want to know how to analyze it for program evaluations and executives will use data to prioritize assessing programs’ return on investment.
“When you think about it from those personas and from that lens, you treat it as a culture shift, and you treat it as really a cultural thing that everybody has a role in, I think you get a greater appetite for data being a part of mission decisions, because now you've got everybody asking the questions, and not just the usually the only data person in the room,” Evans Harris said.