Maximize Impact: Summer Data Optimization Strategies

It’s that time of year again, the flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and cohorts of students and fellows are flooding into the halls and zoom calls of government for the summer. The summer offers enthusiastic students the chance to apply their experience to advance the causes of diverse projects and programs and learn more about making an impact in government before returning to their academic years.

As a senior client success manager, I get a front row seat to see how these projects and programs unfold and intersect with our open data and enterprise data tools at Tyler.

I’ve noticed a few patterns over the seasons and want to share my suggestions for project topics and how you can maximize the impact of those projects this summer.

Data Catalog Freshness Audit

A data catalog clean-up effort is an ongoing maintenance task important for the usability and discoverability of your catalog. Time and again I’ve heard from clients this can be challenging to prioritize ahead of other more time sensitive efforts throughout the year. A data catalog cleanup could include:

• Data freshness: Are data owners updating data at the frequency they’ve indicated? Check out this great data freshness dashboard from the State of Maryland.
• Task your summer staff to review the asset inventory dataset (or provide them a copy) and run an analysis to determine the comparison between the update frequency and last data updated date.

Conduct a Metadata Audit

As our education team is fond of saying, “metadata is a love letter to the future” and it’s true. Good metadata can be the secret sauce that turns a good data catalog into a great one. However, it might also be an easily forgotten ingredient when you have lots of publishing activity or a decentralized publishing model.

• Use the new metadata audit tool to flag which assets might be missing key metadata and take action to resolve.

Consult With Your Client Success Manager

Feel free to reach out to your client success manager or our support team to discuss any questions, ideas, or features and functionality outlined above. Have a great summer!

Run a Tag Audit

Tags and metadata represent two sides of the same coin. Both make assets more discoverable, provide meaningful context, and help users find and understand the data you’re providing. Our tag auditing tools are a crucial component of your tagging strategy and can help you clean up your tags by:

• Providing a site-wide snapshot of your tags, identifying gaps and helping you identify patterns like under-tagging of a particular asset type or publishing audience. Learn more about using the tag audit tool to support an analysis of the tags across your catalog.
• Identifying and making recommendations for reducing duplicate tags. Learn more about utilizing the duplicate tag system dataset to support your audit/cleanup efforts.

Build a Public Data Analysis Dashboard

A great way to help your stakeholders keep up with the success of your program is to create public-facing analytics metrics. This can serve the dual purpose of supporting your overall transparency efforts as well as being a fantastic way to showcase your growing success.

• Start by considering your audience and your goals — why do you want to showcase your site analytics? Is it a way to show progress against your strategic goals and annual reporting? Or perhaps a way to help hold data owners accountable to their publishing commitments?
• Look for metrics beyond the system data sets. Consider other data sources like Google Analytics to share key metrics with your stakeholders. Make sure to include your Google Analytics Token and Google Tag Manager to maximize your ability to view meaningful metrics.
• There are many ways to provide this analysis, but some of the best examples include the work done by the state of Connecticut and the commonwealth of Virginia.

There are so many great ways to engage your summer staff to ensure your data catalog experience is optimized for discoverability, holds relevant and timely data, and is transparent to the public and your stakeholders.

David Marcus is the senior client success manager and team lead with the Data & Insights division of Tyler Technologies. David works with a portfolio of state and local clients in the east and mid-Atlantic regions and is committed to helping them succeed in the maturation and growth of their open data, transparency, and, connected government programs using the open data and enterprise data platforms.