IOC Fellowship Reflection: Department of Innovation, City of Providence Summer 2019

Improving Data Integrity

By Kevin Flakes

Over the course of the Summer I had the opportunity to work as an IOC fellow in the Innovation department for the City of Providence. The Innovation department works to streamline the delivery of city services, promote public entrepreneurship, and enhance citizen engagement. Prior to joining the Urban Affairs program, I worked as a business analyst helping financial clients modernize products and processes to increase efficiency, so the IOC fellowship was a unique opportunity to align my skillset with my interests in urban research. My high-level focus for the summer was to develop standard operating procedures to improve data integrity within the city using the Human Resources department to build a framework. This model included establishing best practices for administrative data handling, restructuring Workers’ Compensation processes, and determining methods to capture EEO data while upholding privacy standards.The mayor’s mission for the city is to assure that Providence is “a city that works,” using several interest areas to define a working city. It was my responsibility to increase the capacity of city functions to ensure not only that the city is working, but that it is working at its highest capacity.

            The first part of my summer was dedicated to a discovery phase identifying process gaps and current practices. Prior to my start, Providence HR had experienced several changes in leadership so the expectation for data integrity and the standard has changed which consequently meant process changes were needed. I sat with the director of HR to understand how data is currently being used within the city and what data could enhance his decision making. The HR director communicated his desire to begin making more evidenced-based decisions using city data. At the time, there was lots of quantitative and qualitative data in HR data but it was inconsistently recorded which made it hard to extract, manipulate or interpret. I then wanted to assess how data was being handled so I sat with different stakeholders in HR to examine how data was being captured. I identified a few possible solutions to organize the city’s administrative data. Administrative data is information used for nonstatistical reasons to provide an overview of operations, this data is everywhere in the city. It was important for me to organize the data so leadership could interpret, protect the information at the individual level and help the handlers understand the purpose of the data and how their role impacts the data.

            Research played a large role in developing a standard operating procedure for data handling. I reached out to other similar sized cities to understand how they were handling data and what information was made available to employees and constituents. The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for open government, had resources for open data and data organization which helped me communicate best practices. I aligned the information from other cities and organizations with the mayor’s mission for the city to develop a document highlight best practices and unique actions Providence can take to ensure data is captured consistently on a large-scale. I developed standard operating procedures to ensure the city’s functions are organized, transparent, valid and reliable, moving Providence in a direction to operate at a higher capacity.

            Using the standard operating procedures documented early in the Summer, I used the framework to also streamline the Workers’ Compensation system to ensure data can be extracted from their claims system. The Workers’ Comp claim system was capturing large amounts of data via MS Excel which is presents high risk to the workers’ compensation data.  Workers’ Comp has a lot of administrative data as well as personal information that shouldn’t be disseminated without proper permissions. It was important to structure the system so administrative data was well organized and statistical data could be easily extracted and interpreted. The HR system was very manual so I had to restructure the existing system to mitigate risk and optimizes data captured. I used excel to restructure the claims tracker, but reduced greatly the amount of manual entry—as a short-term solution. This circumvention detailed the requirements the City of Providence needs in a Workers’ Compensation system.

            I was able to expand the capacity of the system by reorganizing the information so data could be extracted efficiently by management. In order to make the system as effective as possible it was important to sit with the workers’ compensation clerks to explain the types of data they are capturing and how it could be used. Explaining the ‘why’ of their functions helped the clerks to take action quicker and ask more direct questions in the data capturing process, eliminating additional follow-ups and management guidance on routine decision-making. I also sat with the clerks to answer technological questions in order to improve performance rates.

            At the end of the summer I hosted a 3-day training seminar to teach the workers’ compensation department the new system, answer questions and provide insight on how to best use the system. Ultimately, I was able to highlight to the HR Director the requirements needed when developing an RFP for a workers’ compensation system. I was also able to give the City of Providence a framework for data organization in environments that are very manual.

Implementing the new system I learned that capacity building has two major efforts: building the capacity of the system and building the capacity of the user. It’s important for users to understand the purpose of their functions to better aid decision making and to optimize performance within the system. Working with the City of Providence, I was able to under that Innovation is extends beyond modernizing technology – a part of innovation requires ensuring stakeholders, users and subject matter experts understand the purpose of a function or the ‘why’ of a practice to maximize the potential of a system.

I enjoyed my time working with the City of Providence Innovation. I was able to apply experience from the Urban Research Methods course, the Theory of City Planning to guide my decision making and focus areas. The Master of Urban Affairs program at BU has helped me identify the areas of opportunity within city government and develop strategies to align innovation and policy.

Click here to read Kevin Flakes’ interview with our IOC staff.