On Part 2 of our Data Insights series, with Collin Boyce, CIO for the City of Tucson, AZ & Scott Morris, Field Sales Director Public Sector for Qlik, we dive into Tucson's use of Qlik for data-driven insights with data visualization, sharing, and reporting all in one platform.
In this episode, I have the pleasure of chatting with Collin Boyce, Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Tucson, Arizona, to learn about the work they're doing to build a strong data culture. Scott Morris from Qlik joins us as well and together we'll learn what made Tucson choose Qlik to help with end-to-end data management from analytics to community-facing visualizations and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
More info:
Featured government: City of Tucson, AZ
Government Guest: Collin Boyce, CIO
Featured Maker: Qlik
Maker Guest: Scott Morris, Field Sales Director, Public Sector
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch Podcast. Govlaunch is the wiki for local government innovation and on this short series, we’re talking all about data driven insights. I’ll be highlighting some of the innovators in local government leveraging available tools to better use various data sources, to make sense of their data in-house, and ultimately lead more efficient and resilient organizations.
Our goal is to expose local governments of all sizes to the tools available and to provide useful information about some of the leading products out there - so that you can spend less time researching products and asking the hard questions and hopefully get to making smarter, more data-driven decisions much faster. I’m Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Lindsay: (00:50)
Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Collin Boyce, Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Tucson, Arizona, to learn about the work they're doing to build a strong data culture. Scott Morris from Qlik joins us as well and together we'll learn what made Tucson choose Qlik to help with end to end management from analytics to community facing visualizations and what you should know as well in your search for an appropriate vendor.
Lindsay: (01:17)
Thank you both for joining me today. Can you each quickly introduce yourselves and share a bit about your roles? Collin, I'll start with you.
Collin: (01:24)
Sure. My name is Colin Boyce. I am the chief information officer for the city of Tucson, but the chief information officer hat is more like a catch all. So I function as the chief data officer, the chief technical officer in, you know, the chief information security officer. So I guess when, when they got me, they, they lucked out they got a good deal, right. They're getting a four or five for one.
Lindsay: (01:51)
Yeah. Classic in local government. You're wearing a lot of different hats.
Collin: (01:54)
Yeah. So before I came to the city of Tucson, I was pulled into the government industry by the mayor of Lansing, Michigan. And so, you know, from a Qlik perspective, this is my second significant deployment in local government. So a lot of what I will share today will be on kind of initiatives and pushes that I did in both municipalities, which different scale in size, but obviously the same product because we believed in the product.
Lindsay: (02:27)
Great. Scott, how about you?
Scott: (02:30)
Oh, thank you, Lindsay. I’m Scott Morris, I am the field sales director for Qlik software. I manage sales in the Western nine states and I have been with Qlik for just over a year and a half, but I've served in the public sector for 15 years. Prior to that with Oracle and Teradata and really my role as I see it is to bring solutions around analytics and data integration to my customers in the cities, counties and states that I am associated with.
Lindsay: (03:05)
Excellent. Well, just to frame the podcast into the goal is to help local governments who are just starting their data journey, um, tend to discover some tools out there and be inspired by calling your innovative work in both Lansing and in Tucson. So for local governments, just beginning their journey to break down these data silos and work toward more data-driven decision-making, can you provide an example or two of the benefits that you all realized in Tucson specifically from your data work underway?
Collin: (03:36)
Sure. The data work has helped us in significant ways. It's probably no secret, the city of Tucson is one of the first municipal governments that has done an LTE network. Our application process was done with two things, right? We used ESRI to figure out that demographics and where we should deploy, we use the application process with another two correlates of fish, but the back end of where we should deploy where the applications are, all of that was done with the Qlik toolset, pulling that information and aggregating it. And so not only did we understand where we should go with phase one, Qlik is helping us plan the phase two and phase three. And so the maturity level in government with analytics is kind of this unique beast, right? When I came in and said, Hey, let's, let's define metrics and KPIs in local government and we went to do that.
Collin: (04:32)
But the reality is because analytics is such a new paradigm for government and it's done in small silos. We have to take a step backwards and build things for the government. We build stuff for specific departments and gave them an idea kind of to wet the whistle if you will. And once they understood, we started to pull them into the Qlik ecosystem. And so we went from a degree of reluctance to being able to do it and holding on to tools that were built inside of specific systems to there's a level of excitement now where departments are looking for, for that tool set.
Lindsay: (05:13)
And just talking about Tucson more generally, would you say this focus on leveraging data even outside of Qlik as a product, this concept of data-driven insights and really wanting to be focused on that, would you say that really started with you joining the city or was there any work underway before? What was that transition like for you?
Collin: (05:33)
So the majority of the work that you would see happening with that in most local governments will be inside of police forces, right? Um, the police force is by far of the, the most mature. And so our police chief, um, a gentleman by the name of Chris Magnus, and he's probably now more familiar to the United States in a hole that he's been tapped to do border patrol. He had this idea of comstat 360 where wanted to take analytics and create this analytics ecosystem where we can do better policing. And so it started there and there was a lot of good work that was done there. The challenge that we ran into and in reluctance, so naming of a vendor that didn't do well, they started to stretch this vendor beyond what they can do with traditional mapping and we inserted Qlik and what was taking them, you know, two to three minutes to render, move down to two to three seconds to render.
Collin: (06:35)
And it was some excitement. So places that we have done some work in our water department, we have worked on, you know, pulling some stuff and pulling in data and we're looking at now being able to turn some of this back out to citizens where they can track what their water usage is. In real time, we have our planning and neighborhood development that handles all of the permitting and their permitting stuff was not measured. And they were buried under the heavy workload. So we turned, you know, Qlik as the analytics platform to be able to pull out, you know, how many things are in the hopper. You know, what's the amount of work that's happening. Um, even simple things inside of the IT department measuring against our service level targets and our service level agreements with other departments. It's now clear how many tickets we're doing and we can with a click, see exactly what's going on.
Collin: (07:31)
So we've been marching through department by department. And one of the cool things that we we are working on is this product called Tucson stat. And the nice thing about Tucson stat is we can see where the city spends the lion share of their resources. So for example, if there was a house in a neighborhood that code enforcement is going to, or police is going to EMS is going to fire is going to. Today, they're all in different line of business applications. But what we started to do was fold that into one comprehensive dashboard. So now we can see that this house is where we see the most amount of activity, and we can even track that back to the owner of that house. And we can say, Hey, is there a parallel, is it just one bad house in a bad neighborhood? Or is it something that is prevalent with that owner of that house? And they're doing stuff across the city in a bad way and mismanaging property?
Lindsay: (08:32)
Well, you've given me some great examples of departments and ways that they're using it. I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about Qlik and their solution. So Colin, if you could just talk a little bit more about the product for us.
Collin: (08:42)
Sure. So Qlik in for the city of Tucson's usage is an analytics platform. We use it both for internal analytics and for our open data platform. And, you know, through the partnership with Qlik, we've pushed them a little bit where they did not think municipality initially, and things like open data and how do governments approach that. And they were able to do a lot of creative stuff with the city of Tucson, and we're thankful for that. Um, but what it is is a visualization tool for analytics. And so, you know, what we do is we take all of our data and we create a massive data warehouse, which, you know, with the tools that are in the Qlik universe or some of the tools in the analytics universe, it's a very quick automation tools that you can use to do that.
Collin: (09:31)
And then we put Qlik on top of that and inside of memory, Qlik is able to create these awesome visualizations. So visualizations can range from seeing heat maps on a standard map. So you can see hotspots inside of cities and using the GI analytics components. You could see what the trend looks like. In Lansing, Michigan, one of the things that we did that was really cool was we wanted to see the trend of what legalizing marijuana had on the community. And so using the geo analytics component, we were able to click and see that where code enforcement and police events gravitated towards that were also where the marijuana locations were.
Collin: (10:16)
Now, we want to be careful with assuming causation, but what we saw was on the outskirts of town, where there was less marijuana locations that, that zoning, that was the last events. And so we realized that changing how we zoned may affect, um, you know, the quality of life of citizens. And so we see Qlik as more of a, a tool to help us measure performance, as well as increase the quality of life for our citizens if used properly. And so the internal running joke that I have inside the department is what I want is the city manager to come in every morning. And instead of reading the newspaper is to grab his morning coffee and sit down and look at a Qlik dashboard. And that's our goal.
Lindsay: (11:04)
That's awesome. Scott, what would you add?
Scott: (11:07)
We coined a phrase called the active intelligence at Qlik, and the idea is being able to manage the data through from its source rendering in the business applications that Collin was speaking. And there are many inside, um, municipalities, cities and counties, and being able to stream that data into and build a modern data warehouse so that the data can then be analyzed. Uh, one of the, one of the unique differentiators here though, is there's a factor of governance over the data as well when you use Qlik. The catalog capabilities inside of Qlik are quite unique, uh, to our solution, um, and something that, uh, Collins um, uh, colleagues over at Pima county are also using to get the most out of their information. So, um, yeah, I mean, active intelligence, bringing insights to the people, um, showing that we like to call it the gray data, that the data that isn't necessarily part of what the question you asked, but has relevance and,that's something that you only get with a Qlik solution.
Scott: (12:20)
I have a question for Collin. This is really designed as a self service application. So have you seen users able to, um, grow and build out their own communities, um, where are you? Are you still building everything for them?
Collin: (12:37)
So we are doing more of the building for them because the skillset internally inside of the city just isn't isn't there yet. And it's not that the tool is hard, right? It's the skill set is not there, and you have people who already had a defined day job. Um, but I'm going to walk back that question just a little bit to explain one of the reasons why we selected Qlik. So in Lansing, Michigan, there was not an analytics tool. So Qlik was the first analytics tool that existed in Lansing, Michigan. With Tucson, Arizona, we had another tool, but it didn't really get a lot of use and why we selected Qlik was partly because a lot of the data science tools flip from one extreme to the other.
Collin: (13:30)
So it is you need a data science to be able to do everything, and there's no such thing as self-service, or it gravitates towards heavy self-service. And there's no sharing of, um, things between the two ecosystems. And what we found was Qlik was more in the middle. It was more of a hybridized solution where you can have a data scientist, or you can democratize the data and allow end users to do whatever they needed to do. And we selected the platform, partly because we wanted that flexibility. And as the CIO, one of the things that I realize is, you know, IT departments have a tendency to swing from one extreme to the other extreme. So, you know, we're either all cloud or we're all on prem. We're nowhere in the middle, over all agile or waterfall, but we're never in the middle. And Qlik was more of a middle ground solution. Um, it gave us the flexibility that we needed to, to guide them through the initial experience. And now there's a lot of interest where there's some departments at a higher maturity level. They're like, we want to do our own dashboards. And so we're pointing them to Qlik training. They're learning the tool and they're going to start developing, you know, on top of what we've already developed. And we found that that was the best way to approach it in our universe.
Lindsay: (14:53)
Well, that's fantastic that you bring up. I mean, I was going to ask the dumb question, perhaps I'm a local government. I've got Excel sheets across the board, so I can take my Excel sheets and I can somehow get them into the Qlik universe. And I'm going to have a beautiful dashboard that tells me what I need to know with all of this data. Is that generally correct, Collin?
Collin: (15:14)
So we are not pulling in Excel dashboards. What we are actually doing is giving them access. So Excel dashboards in our world was people extracting stuff from databases, dump them into Excel, and then try to create Excel visualizations. And then what happened was when the Excel visualization needed be updated, they would do that process. So you have someone daily, two to three times a day doing this process. And so what we're going for is, Hey, what if we don't do this? What if we establish the connection directly to that backend database? And it's pulling its data three or four times a day, and you don't have to do anything to massage the data and create your new graphs. It just happens. It just happens. And so we're starting to do that. And we found candidly thousands, thousands of Excel spreadsheets, access databases that were built that way. And today what we're doing is we're handholding departments through the conversion process and getting it all plugged in and then providing kind of entry level training and providing kind of one-on-one training that they can do online so they can continue to grow. And so this is a journey and we're in the early parts of the journey, but it's exciting because the adoption is a lot better than we expected it to be.
Lindsay: (16:42)
Well, that's great. And Scott, I know the use cases are really broad with a solution like yours. I mean, you don't specifically say we only take data in this area. It's you know any data local government is working with. Can you share an example or two of how another local government is leveraging Qlik, perhaps some smaller than Tucson?
Scott: (17:02)
Sure. So Collin as has speaking primarily on the, on the data analytics side of our business, which is, which is the Qlik or what we call QDA, um, the, the QDI, uh, side of the business, which is the Qlik data integration platform, which is the data warehouse modernization platform and streaming data piece and the data prep side. Um, I, I I'll take a say the California department of developmental services, um, who had a really interesting problem. They have over 21 separate and distinct sites where they reach out to the community, provide classes and services to youth and adults with learning disabilities of some degree or another. They needed a way to get that data in real time, up to their central location, bring it back to the governing bodies to make sure that all of this information was, uh, and, and the, and all of their partners who were delivering the services at the community centers.
Scott: (18:15)
Um, they're doing, they have, you can imagine Collin it was a very disparate group of databases, and, you know, the old ASMR four hundreds were out there at each of the community centers with DB two. We had that data being streamed back to a large Oracle data warehouse. Uh, well, it wasn't being streamed back. It was being chunked back occasionally. Right. Um, what we were able to do is create a network of database streaming to bring it back and then catalog the data for BI ready use inside of not only our Qlik tools, but you have to be able to respect the autonomy of other, uh, products.
Scott: (18:58)
I mean, there's, it's no secret that there are other tools on the market that have been in use for awhile and Qliks catalog respects the fact that people might have another product. And so we, we solved that problem in short order and moved it to a modern snowflake data warehouse platform which really digitized the entire office or department, I should say,
Lindsay: (19:24)
Collin. There's a lot of products out there in the market to help better manage and make sense of this data. I want to get into why you chose them over some of the competitors in this space, outside of the argument you made for their more hybrid functionality.
Collin: (19:38)
Sure. Um, so when we engaged in Lansing, the pricing model made sense for us, and it made even more sense for us when I became, uh, the CIO for the city of Tucson. So Lansing was, or Lansing is a city that's primarily funded by property tax. And there is no doubt, right? Four years ago, the Lansing market was a terrible housing market. So houses, prices depreciated, and the Qlik team was willing to work with us with, you know, coming up with creative processes and how to get it priced in a way that works for us. Um, no, the details of that, I would say, you know, work with your Qlik team, they are more than willing to, to come up with creative approaches, to, to problems. Tucson is even more different. Um, I thought property tax was going to be a hard one to conquer, but Tucson is funded by primarily sales tax and we're in the middle of a pandemic.
Collin: (20:45)
When I came into the city, we purchased an initial seed of Qlik. And then we purchased more during the middle of the pandemic. And because we're funded by sales tax, no surprise here, right? People were not buying cars in the middle of a pandemic, and there's not enough toilet paper and hand sanitizer to make up for housing sales are diminishing or car sales going down. And the Qlik team was willing to sit down with us at the table and work with us. We were able to get the entire police force access to Qlik during that same time. And they were very much competitive with the pricing that we're working with and flexible with us. Um, the other thing that we were looking at was obviously the hybridized approach, which we talked about before.
Collin: (21:35)
The speed of the platform. So getting our data warehouse up and running and getting visualizations going inside of Qlik. My experience with Lansing was I took a, a kid fresh out of college. And within three months he was building visualizations for just about every department in Lansing. So much so he is now a consultant at a company called wit in Michigan.And we wanted to recreate that same quick learning curve here.
Collin: (22:05)
So I took a lady, we had in a department, she was an application analyst and we turned her onto the Qlik platform. And, you know, we didn't use Qlik training. We used the new deli and she looked at some U Demi videos. And within two to three weeks, she was building dashboards for different things inside of the city and experimenting with the platform.So amazing quick turnaround. So we wanted the personnel piece, you know, ability to learn the platform really quickly. We wanted the best technology we can get that was hybridized and flexible for what we wanted to do. And then we had a consulting base that was pretty strong, that helped us with some of the process things that we were struggling with. So, you know, how do we promote things from our production environment to our open data platform, helping us with some of our open data governance rules. And so it was an easy button for us to get from zero to a hundred. We were able to do that pretty quickly.
Lindsay: (23:09)
And Scott, what would you say are your differentiators in the market?
Scott: (23:13)
Uh, I, it's a flattering to hear Colin, uh, give us praise on easy to do business with. And, uh, I would say that that's a power position of Qlik. We are easy to do business with. We're now, um, a billion dollar company. We're still private and make it easy and we're as agile as we've ever been, um, even with all of the acquisitions. So that is a true differentiator. Being able to work one-on-one with your uh Qlik team. I think the support in our business is something that our customers would say is fantastic.
Lindsay: (23:51)
And after working through implementation with about 200 local governments across the US and also your expertise in working in this data realm for all of these years, what's some advice you'd share with the local government looking for a solution, like the one you offer at Qlik?
Scott: (24:07)
I would say, if you're out in the marketplace to, to sort of create that digital transformation that that government is now being forced to do because of this pandemic, you know, look at modernizing your data platform. And when you do that, you're gonna want tools that allow data to flow freely to your analytics platform, uh, the messaging and the work that the Qlik R&D folks have done managing the data platform from many, many different disparate data sources. It's also one of our strengths. You know, we have over 80 connectors to different databases and targets all of the cloud vendors. Whether you're Google or AWS or Azure, we have the ability to support those structures. So look, look at being able to go with a vendor that can stream it in real time, build it without putting your hands on the dashboard and then have the analytics tool capable to serve both the data scientist, as well as the, uh, the person who gets in there once a week to print a report.
Lindsay: (25:23)
Great, great advice. And Collin, I want to end with some advice from you. What are some takeaways you'd want another local government to keep in mind when looking at vendors for data analytics?
Collin: (25:32)
Sure. Well, I would say, you know, acquisition, right? Being able to have someone who is flexible and you can easily acquire the product and speed of the product, being able to grow, to meet your enterprise needs. Um, but not so big that you can't start off, right? So there's some of them that they're so large that you need to sign off a six or seven figure check in order to get them in the door. Um, but something that is small enough that will grow with what you need. And then for your analytics journey, I would say the first thing that you want to do is wrap your arms around what your data sets look like. Pulling up dashboards between departments and departments and looking at the line of business applications and understanding what that data looks like. Because your journey is going to lead you with data cleansing is going to be one of the first things and consistency in how you manage that data. It's going to be important, have a good partner with you that can help you with creative solutions around those things. And then once you start to get your arms wrapped around the data of what's in your system, then starting to blend that data between departments and departments. What I found in city government is that there's manual workarounds in how data is shared. And this can be a thing where the data is shared in more real-time and more consistently throughout your, your environment.
Collin: (27:01)
And then as you continue your journey, right? So you have the basic dashboarding, what has happened, the blended dashboards, what has happened and how the multiple departments affect that universe, then the things that you can be, you know, that next level of your journey. And the nice thing about Qlik is they are building out that ecosystem. So many of those tools that they have today, but they're constantly looking to improve the product. And so they're not resting on their laurels. They're continuing to grow and become better and better.
Lindsay: (27:35)
I'm glad you brought up that point about sanitizing, the data or cleaning up the data. So many local governments overlook that. They think, okay, let's implement this flashy product. It's going to solve all my problems, but if you don't have good data integrity in the backend, or a way to manage that data, spitting bad data into even a great tool, like Qlik, isn't gonna get you very far. Um, even if it's instant.
Collin: (27:59)
Yeah, I would throw this example out because it's one from Lansing, Michigan. If you take everyone inside of the room and you take 20 people inside of a room, and you say, how would you say Martin Luther king Boulevard, you'll come up with probably 40 different ways to say Martin Luther king Boulevard. And until that lexicon is the same. It becomes problematic. We saw everything from MLK to Martin, to Martain typographical errors to there. That data cleansing is going to be key. And, you know, you know, thank God for, you know, the companies in the analytics space on that Qlik has, are partnered with, or they've acquired. They make it easy to do that clean up, and that's going to be the hardest part of your journey is making the historical data look the same. And so the rule that we came up with in Lansing, as well as Tucson is we don't mind that your data is not consistent with another department, but at least be consistent with yourself. If you're consistent with yourself, we can plan around that.
Lindsay: (29:10)
Right. Right. Well, and it's just scratches the surface, and I'm glad we brought this up because accompanying this podcast series, we also have a guide that's going to break down some of these really actionable first steps to starting out on your data journey. Before you can do a flashy open data portal that residents can interact with, some of these cleanup type jobs need to be done. So Colin and Scott, thank you both for being here and sharing your important work with the wider community of local governments looking for these tools to engage more with their data and to do so seamlessly. It sounds like Qlik is a great option if you're looking for really fast analytics in beautiful dashboards as you said, Colin. So Collin, keep up the exciting work in Tucson and best of luck to any Scott on behalf of Qlik.
Scott: (29:54)
Thanks for your time, Lindsay.
Collin: (29:56)
Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you all for inviting me.
Lindsay: (30:04)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.