Finding Value in a Crisis How Open Data in Government Came to a Timely Rescue

ABSTRACT

Leaders provided datasets, performance measures, and several open finance application areas, such as economic development, human services, public works and governance. The charts illustrated the difficulty in spending $158 million in such a short period of time, as shown in Figure 2. Because leaders across departments could see the low spending slope line in the visualization, they quickly realized they would need to ramp up efforts to get the money out the door into the community. Pierce County established several external open data goals to provide transparency and accountability to citizens * Show citizens what their government is doing. * Provide greater access to data. * Make displays of financial data easy to understand. * Improve outcomes for the constituency served. Pierce County's key takeaways for the success of the platform include * Ability to see data quickly and at a high level for decision-making. * Visualizations of connections between financial data and services, as shown in Figure 4 on page 16. * Automation, especially where financial data is extracted automatically from sources. * Centralized staff resources to manage data updates and the reporting process. * Cloud-based software with quick self-service capabilities.