1. The innovation officer role varies from city to city. What are you working on?
A primary focus I have right now is that the city hired Novak Consulting Group to do an organizational assessment and identify opportunities for performance optimization. Where can we make improvements to provide better service to our citizens? We’re reviewing the recommendations internally, reprioritizing based on our resources and what we think will be the most impactful, and then coming up with a plan to implement those. I call it that gray space of government that involves multiple departments and focuses on the mayoral priorities to help them collaborate, be creative, and use data and technology to inform decision-making and improve services.2. Are you still involved with GIS work?
One thing that I was a part of was the Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge. We weren’t one of the big winners, but now we’re talking about how to take what we did with Bloomberg and figure out what pieces we can actually develop. Called Floodcon, the project was a predictive analytics tool that took historic data on road closures, weather and what the tidal gauge was in Charleston Harbor. Users could sign up and it would give predictions on the possibility of them experiencing flooding.Sea level rise, storm water management and flooding are big issues here in Charleston. We’re talking through how to start building meaningful metrics around showing that we’re moving the needle, that we’re making progress. Longer term, how do we build not just accountability but also be able to illustrate to the citizens that there’s a lot of good work being done and we’re making progress? Because flooding is going to continue to be important here in Charleston.