Chris Belasco, The main data officer (CDO) in the city of Pittsburgh, focused on the coasts of his team. While some data leaders may like the glory of their personal achievements, Belasco says that the success in a rapidly developing digital era concerns a lot of student approach: “Complaints should come to me, and the credit should go to the team.”
Belasco reached the position of CDO, transmitting its assessments and analysts from academic circles to the public sector. He received a doctoral degree of public relations and ruled a unit at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducted great assessments of the impact on democracy and foreign assistance to the US agency for international development.
With a young family, he sought to establish roots at the local level and joined the city of Pittsburgh in 2018 as the head of the enterprise project. He switched to the role of CDO in 2022 and enjoyed the opportunity to help his organization to build Data pipelines And clarify its operational processes.
“I was lucky to have good team members, some of which are still here,” he said. “I built the rest of the team, which has incredibly acute data development skills, which, I think, are a good way to emphasize the possibility of what the city can offer.”
As a reflection of these possibilities, Pittsburgh has reached a higher level Bloomberg Philanthropies' What Works Citory Certification Earlier this year. Certification recognized how the city has established the possibilities of informing about politics, distribute financing, improving services, evaluating programs and attracting residents. Belaco is proud of this achievement.
“Thirty-eight cities are either gold or platinum in the western hemisphere, and we beat much higher than our weight category with the capabilities and practices that we can demonstrate,” he says. “What we can achieve thanks to the work that we do, for example, partnership with an astronomer, is quite impressive.”
Creating a fresh approach
As Pittsburgh CDO, Belasco controls analytical, data development and software development to improve the city’s activities. His team is building connecting fabric for city departments to focus on helping residents, and not on managing the infrastructure.
“My work is mainly to make sure that the team has the resources necessary to succeed,” he says. “I like to help people make the best decisions, providing them with the resources that they need for this, and help in achieving transparency.”
Belasco says that another key element of his work is to ensure that the data helps the city achieve its goals that are focused on the requirements of citizens: “My role is to combine people in bunks and departments of our organization, as well as the public and our partners to make sure that they know the assets that we have.
“I need to make sure that we use these assets strategically, and that we achieve the goals set by the leadership in the city. We must give the public some of the fact that they are accustomed to expect from cities in this digital era. This is the ability to promote our practices by listening to people who say that this is what you should work on. ”
Belasco says that the general direction from the point of view of digital transformation is to help Pittsburgh become a data center. He says that the city has achieved significant success before it has achieved the organization, referring to a series of dynamic leaders who sought to help the city progress in the data space.
Since he became CDO, Belasco continued this work. He indicates the transition of the organization to the cloud, assuming that his role in the ongoing digital transformation of Pittsburgh includes connecting to the best practices in other places and ensuring that his team has a runway for effective work.
“We are going to launch our first Open data Report from 2017. We were able to release open data sets and cooperate with our partners in the intermediaries for data in order to carry out projects of data controlled by the community and the community that help justice and justice. We have also reached some safety measures that feel a little unheard of in our area, ”he says.
“We collaborated with human resources, the department of public work, which was the leader of the pilot, and the mayor, and we created the ability to report on security incidents and indicators of the results. This work has reduced security incidents and guarantees that employees can safely go home from work, and this is clearly extremely important. ”
Opening access to data
Belaco and his team were also focused on creating real -time monitoring in real time, which provide open access to state data. This work program is based on the implementation of the organization Astronomer technologyField
ASTRO platform helps the BELASCO team to manage the city Apache Airflow Data TipelinesThe field before introducing the platform, the team retained its media in the Google Cloud Composer. Nevertheless, the team struggled the composers and spent valuable problems of the fire when they wanted to focus on the development of innovative civil services.
Belaco and his colleagues appreciated their options and believed that astro could support digital transformation. The data team began migration in Astro at the beginning of 2024, as soon as they demonstrated the case of changing senior leaders of the city.
“I like to help people make the best decisions, providing them with the resources necessary for this and helping to achieve transparency”
Chris Belasco, the city of Pittsburgh
“We tried to come up with an assessment of how much time we will spend images of service composers,” he says. “We tried to be entrepreneurial regarding how we could help free time for our people who knew engineering, but spent time managing the data. Therefore, astro was for us so that we could not spend our time and transfer it to something else. The leaders realized that we tried to make our processes more effective. ”
One of the most important initiatives supported by Astro is the recently launched city. OneStoppgh Insights Tool, a web application that allows residents to track permits to the neighborhood, violations of code and zoning application in real time. Belasco says that the innovative initiative is an excellent example of how its organization is working to create services with data support for Pittsburgh citizens.
“The site will tell you all the different details of the information related to the area that you are exploring,” he says, adding that more than 30 types of permits are already tracked. “Soon the platform will also include everything, from our department of mobility and infrastructure, for example, information related to transport, rights and streets.”
About 99% of urban data in astro, which became a unified orchestra platform of the city. Astro shift included more than four million rows of transformed data in 13 pipelines. The platform also maintains efforts according to the open data of the city, allowing scientists to data and the public to freely and easy to use information.
“These technologies are the basis for creating useful visualizations,” says Belasko.
Provinging the value of information
Belasco says that the work around Astro is a good example of changes under the guidance of data that its organization is trying to continue. At all stages of this initiative and other transformation projects, there is a constant attempt to build strong ties with business professionals.
He gives an example of how this connected approach helped to prove the advantages of the instrument of InstoPPGH Insights for the wider Pittsburgh community: “There is a project manager in another department that observes the implementation of the software used for this work program.
“They are also the person who went to public groups to talk with them about the use and transition to this new software. And people in the community had nothing but good to say. So, this initiative is the triumph of several different teams working together to do the work. ”
When it comes to lessons for other business leaders and digital technologies, Belasco says that modern data managers must ensure that people throughout the organization understand the value of projects that give an idea for business and external customers. His team stands on the shoulders of earlier work and recognition of the advantages of transformation in Pittsburgh.
“I feel that it all started with cultural changes in technological leadership in the city, which we were able to take with us and grow. I want to pay tribute to the IT directors and former leaders of our organization, who helped develop this culture in different departments so that these people in various departments can get interesting projects, ”he says.
“You grow trust at the department level of departure and force everyone to move in one direction as close as possible. We acted as a subcommittee to help everyone believe in our work, and had the right to vote in what we were doing. This institutionalization is a way that we were able to achieve our goals as they move forward, and then these conversations are translated into the products that we create. ”
Creating long -term trust
The data team continues to look for new ways to use information. When it comes to artificial intelligence, Belasco says that the goal is to carefully study new technologies. “We are working on the adaptation of our activity to make sure that our labor force has tools to perform a higher order,” he adds. “This is our path.”
Belasco says that successful data projects are communication and cooperation: “When you say:“ Ok, this is what we need to do, ”and you have someone from the business department that plays a leading role in the work that you do and they say:“ This is what I need to see from the project, ”then you start working with other people to achieve your goals.”
The key to the success of data is to obtain the right people from other business lines throughout the organization, involved early and quickly.
“The thing is to get visibility from teams and experts in subjects to help make sure that they have a voice and can contribute,” says Belasco. “You must strengthen the trust between your team and business specialists and senior leaders in the organization.”
