#132 Data For Good, with Chief Data Officer of the City of LA, Jeanne Holm
In episode 4 of our “Bitesize Insights for Data-Driven Leaders” Series, Jeanne Holm is the Chief Data Officer at the City of Los Angeles. She works at the cross-section of civic innovation, open data, and education, addressing issues ranging from homelessness to digital equity technology innovation, data and analytics, and public-private partnerships.
She’s had an incredible professional journey, working as senior consultant for the World Bank, Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA and as the the Evangelist for open data for the U.S. White House. She is now putting all of her experience to good use at her hometown, the city of Los Angeles.
As CDO, Jeanne focuses on taking data, like the number of people trained in the city’s workforce centers or how sustainable their practices are, and making it available and accessible to the taxpayers. To enable this, she works with individuals within the government that are not data scientists, and provides support and data literacy training in order to facilitate their understanding on how to structure, manage and put context around data. She also cooperates with entities outside the government, like academic researchers, businesses, and advocacy groups who want to use the data but need the information and context around it.
Jeanne tells us about the value teamwork has for her and she summarizes it with the african saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Stay tuned to learn more about how her role is the bridge between technology and context that makes sure the city is able to harness and leverage data for social impact.
Enjoy Jeanne Holm in our “Bitesize Insights for Data-Driven Leaders” Series!
We speak about:
[2:45] How did you come into the world of data?
[4:40] Moving into the data space, was that something that just happened for you or you did that move deliberately?
[6:25] How would you describe the role of a Chief Data Officer in a city?
[8:27] The internal training you run, how does that look like?
[11:25] How do you decide what issues you’ll focus on?
[14:20] What are your thoughts about leading during these times of change?
[17:48] How did you build your team, and how do you go about growing it?
[23:30] What are the initiatives around transparency?
[26:24] What do you see as the biggest challenge for leadership in data science?
Resources:
Jeanne’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanneholm/
Jeanne’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeanneholm
City of Los Angeles on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/city-of-los-angeles/
Quotes:
"The thing that connects all of these different pieces is wanting to tell stories that help people create different actions."
"A Chief Data Officer focuses on organising and helping to bring out the data from different parts of the organisation and then either to make it easier to share within the organisation or to also share that out with the public."
"We've found that the community as a whole has done a lot around data literacy and there's no reason we need to reinvent it. There are some pieces that we do that are more about the context."
"If you set the directions, set the pace, and support people and are compassionate to their own issues; I think you can build and lead an amazing group of people."
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