Cleveland’s open data overhaul: From sticky notes to public dashboards
Cleveland’s real breakthrough is not the dashboard itself. It is the creation of a governing model that turns scattered records into a managed civic asset. For public-sector leaders, the key question is whether data is being treated as a by-product of departments or as a shared service with clear ownership, standards and release rules. Without that shift, open data initiatives become brittle showcases rather than durable operating capability.
The executive order matters because it changes decision rights. By naming data as a strategic asset and standing up a governance board, the city gave the CITO leverage to set priorities across more than 30 departments. That reduces the risk of local workarounds, but it also creates a new management burden: every department now has to reconcile its own operational needs with citywide transparency goals, privacy obligations and resourcing limits. Leaders should ask who can approve exceptions, who funds remediation, and how disputes are escalated.
The harder challenge is not technology selection but conversion work. Cleveland still has to standardise definitions, clean up legacy sources and grow a bench of data leads who can sustain the model after launch. The trade-off is clear: faster public wins can coexist with technical debt if the city does not budget for ongoing stewardship. Decision-makers should track not only portal traffic, but also inventory completeness, data quality, time-to-publish and the number of datasets with named owners.
For CIOs and transformation leaders, the next question is whether open data is linked to service redesign. If dashboards simply expose existing processes, the organisational benefit will be modest. If they are used to rework workflows, reduce manual reporting and improve accountability across departments, then the platform becomes a management tool rather than a communications layer.
Gaining mayoral support for open data
To modernize the local government offices, Crowe said her team members assessed the business problems and identified their No. 1 directive — getting to open data. Bibb’s second executive order established an open data policy and open data governance board, a move that provided Crowe with the official backing to tell governmental departments they would need to get on board with the data management initiative. “This executive order declared data as a strategic asset that is critical to meeting the demands of a modern government,” Crowe said. Thus, the Original Postolicy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" shape="rect">City of Cleveland Open Data Policy was born in December 2023. According to the policy, “By leveraging data as a strategic asset, the City can address challenges proactively, optimize resource allocation, improve service delivery, and increase transparency.” In addition, all city of Cleveland departments were tasked with adopting a framework that includes a data inventory, data standards, data use and infrastructure, open data and a governance board.Creating a city data inventory
With the mayor’s executive order in place, the next step for Crowe was to create an inventory of what data was already available within Cleveland’s local government. “Sometimes I would go to people and say, ‘Where is your data?’ And they would point, literally, to the server under their desk. I had to start telling them, ‘If you kick your data when you get your coffee in the morning, we’re doing it wrong. Let’s come up with a better way to tackle this data here.'” Crowe said she discovered data was residing in disparate locations, from Excel spreadsheets to sticky notes surrounding one staff member’s monitor.Establishing the tech stack
After inventorying Cleveland’s public data, Crowe’s team set out to select vendors and enterprise data dashboard software. “We had data on-prem, we had data in the cloud, but we had no analytics warehouse that we could then use,” she explained. When it came to finding a vendor, Crowe said her team focused on the overarching goal of “getting to open data” while “considering each layer of our tech stack and treating each phase of the data separately.” As a Microsoft shop, Crowe’s team chose Microsoft Azure Commercial Cloud, along with Microsoft Power BI, a data visualization and business intelligence tool. The team also selected Esri as its GIS mapping software vendor. “I had a greenfield [environment],” Crowe said. “The cool part about a greenfield is I can build a modern tech stack that has prepared us for the next wave of analytics work. The challenge of a greenfield is you don’t have anything to start with. So, you don’t have a framework, and you don’t have a governance.”Upskilling across Cleveland
Once vendor selection was established, Crowe assessed the technical skills of her 16 team members to determine where they could “become experts” and train other departments, and where she needed to fill in gaps by identifying “a bench of analysts around the city.” “We knew that we needed folks who would talk about data, who could educate about data, who knew and understood how to use tools in a modern tech stack,” Crowe said. Her team tasked the more than 30 departments across the city with identifying “data leads” — employees with degrees in areas such as data analytics who could meet with Crowe’s team monthly for training and professional development. Finally, Crowe’s team established a data policy based on a level system from one through four. Level one is data that’s open to the public; level two is operational information like how many help desk tickets come in; level three relates to compliance data such as HIPAA and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA); and level four is restricted and confidential data. This month marks the two-year anniversary of Cleveland’s open data portal, which Crowe’s team launched in April 2024. Among the public-facing dashboards is a Cleveland Cemetery Viewer tool, which lets residents locate burial plots, and an online 311 dashboard to look up service requests. The team is also working on a property insights tool that will integrate data from 15 city systems into a web map — users will be able to search for information about property ownership, transfers and sales. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Crowe said. “These are my top three, but we’ve got a ton of other public tools that we’ve been able to build and develop and launch.”Enjoyed this article? Sign up for our newsletter to receive regular insights and stay connected.