In this podcast, we sit down with municipal IT managers and industry providers who have found a way to connect with citizens at the speed of now. Listen as panelists Akshay Malik of Philadelphia, Kevin Hood of Tableau, and Josh Green, representing Adobe, discuss how Philadelphia and other U.S. Smart Cities have improved interactions with citizens through data visualization and a streamlined user experience.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Adobe, Tableau and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around Smart Cities and Smart Governance. Panelists, Akshay Malik, Infrastructure Innovation Coordinator for the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability at the City of Philadelphia, Kevin Hood, Senior Manager of Solution Engineers at Tableau, and Josh Green, Adobe Product Specialist Team Lead at Carahsoft Technology Corporation, along with moderator Robert Moore, VP of Sales at Carahsoft, will discuss how Philadelphia and other US Smart Cities have improved interactions with citizens through data visualization, and to streamlined user experience.
Robert Moore: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Before diving in today's discussion, I thought first we'd go around and give everyone give all our panelists just a minute or two to introduce themselves, and give our audience a sense of who you are and what you do. Akshay, I thought maybe we'd start with you today, if you don't mind giving us a little blurb on who you are, and what it is you do day to day.
Akshay Malik: Hi, good afternoon. Good morning. My name is Akshay Malik, I am the infrastructure innovation coordinator for the city of Philadelphia. And as the infrastructure innovation coordinator, support cities, technology and innovation strategies to improve operations and maintenance or service delivery of city's infrastructure. My focus is mainly pilot programs and our programs that allow coordinating operating entities, daily operations and strategic planning, specifically in the field of mobility and priority management.
Robert Moore: Thank you, Akshay. It sounds like you have a lot of time on your hands. Kevin, how about you? Would you mind giving us a little bit of background on yourself? Who kind of who are you and what do you do day to day?
Kevin Hood: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that, Robert. So my name is Kevin Hood. And I am the manager of solution engineers for Tableau for state and local government across half the United States. And our job is to help folks on the call the cities, the counties, the states with being successful in their analytics journey. So you know, Tableau is obviously all about how do we help you see and understand data, really, the net it all out. And so that's what we try to do with all the customers that we work with. So happy to be here.
Robert Moore: Excellent. Thank you, Kevin. And Josh, same questions for you. Give us a little background. Who are you? And what do you do?
Josh Green: Yeah, thanks so much, Rob. My name is Josh Green. I am a team lead here for the Adobe product specialist team. I graduated George Mason University in 2010 with a degree in media communication and culture. I've been working with Carahsoft technology ever since. So I've spent my time here at Carahsoft, assisting us agencies and governments with using the Adobe Experience cloud solutions. And you know, all different respects from licensing assistance, implementation assistance, and general technical support to establish the kind of digital foundations necessary for engaging with residents and stakeholders and personalized and effective ways.
Robert Moore: Fantastic. Thank you. Actually, if you don't mind, I'm gonna start with you. We've got listeners from all over the country. You know, from East Coast, West Coast, never in between I imagine some folks are familiar with city of Philadelphia and things that's famous for maybe the birthplace of America home to Liberty Bell, the Phillies only decent place and get a cheese steak, you know, whatever your Philadelphia connection is, right? But would you mind just taking a minute or two and given everybody a real sense of what is the city of Philadelphia like? What’s the spirit of the city?
Akshay Malik: I think, just on behalf of the City side of things, from a postal standpoint, it's great to see how the government functions with the kind of shoestring budgets, we have an extra pandemic, we had a huge hole in our budget, I think all cities across the country suffered a huge decline in their budgetary resources. We thought we'll have some of that gap filled up with some funding coming in from the state or the federal level, but that's not the case. So from a government standpoint, we still kind of pay way tight on the budget side. And I think we do a good job at understanding what our constraints are, and try and manage within that with the highest efficiency we can possibly, obviously the constraints that are there are delays that are that are technology constraints that are human resources. And those things are part and parcel of how you operate in the government. So things change slowly. And you have to kind of work with that as new problems arise. So I don't know if that answers your question about looking for yield. Now. It's a different thing when you look at it from inside the government. And if you walk down the street, that's obviously amazing. Like Philadelphia has been recently called the one of the top 100 places to be visited. I guess really nice place to be in and I enjoy. I love all neighborhoods that I've been in. I think there's a lot to explore around here.
Robert Moore: Excellent. Thank you. Just for context, what's the approximate population in Philadelphia?
Akshay Malik: Approximately 1.5 million. Yeah, roughly.
Robert Moore: Okay. So certainly not a small city. And probably all the complexity of a large, large city.
Akshay Malik: It's the fifth largest city, I believe, in the country. So by population moved to six lately, but yeah,
Robert Moore: Yeah. You're for sure, one of the largest. And so and when I was last in Philadelphia, it would have been February of 2020. And I visited many times over the years. My memory of the city is it's a diverse population and sort of a suburban urban type of structure to it sort of a good healthy mix of fair characterization.
Akshay Malik: I would say it's much, much more dense than most other places that I've been doing, the other large, like New York, obviously, compared to but maybe LA or other cities, it's fairly dense. It's fairly transit oriented. We have a very strong transit driven network, a transit network that that allows the density to be focused on around those networks. So I would say we have fairly dense compared to other cities. And that's one thing that brings efficiency to how the city operates at large.
Robert Moore: Okay, excellent. Thank you. Kevin, if you don't mind, would you maybe give everybody just a little bit of background on Tableau at a high level? I sort of think that folks here have Tableau described as visualization software, but maybe, can you quickly get us to the root of what does that really mean? What do y'all do?
Kevin Hood: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, so what we do is, you're dealing with data, and you're dealing with it from a bunch of disparate sources. So I'll use the analogy of, if you took all that data and dumped it into a nice Excel spreadsheet, and there's nothing, you know, for all the Excel users out there, you know, it does what it needs to do. But if you were to say, give me the outlier, out of the 1000 numbers, showing up in your crosstab, or Excel spreadsheet, or show me where there's peaks and valleys, just off your eyesight, right. And so what Tableau does is it takes that information, and it puts it in a format visualization format, if you will, and it draws your eyes much more quickly to that insight. And so that time to insights increase. And also you see things that may go against what your assumptions were right, you may say that, jeez, I thought this is what's going on. But this is what's going on, right? We're all about truly, you know, seeing the data in a much more better way, and then understanding it better by virtue of that. And that's essentially what Apple does. And we have a platform in place that allows that to scale out to all the different types of stakeholders. So whether it's public citizens, or internally within the cities, like city of Philadelphia, where they're looking at HR, finance, internal type of operations, or on the public facing side of it, for instance, the city of Philadelphia, you know, I'm sure we're all familiar with the COVID tracking dashboards we've been seeing at the state city and county levels. That's us. That's, that's what we do.
Robert Moore: Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you both. So maybe let's talk Smart Cities. And I'm going to give a little background on some research that I found and came across while preparing for this. Actually the city of Philadelphia, you all have a formally published document that establishes your city roadmap for our viewers and listeners, if you went to a browser and typed in Smart City PHL, you should be able to locate this document fairly easily. It really does quite a good job, I think of capturing the city's approach to many of the aspects of how to drive initiatives and innovation forward. It's interesting, it had a list of four guiding principles that I noted down that were good to see those being locally inspired, innovative, equitable, and collaborative. And really a very good summary document. And it's interesting, a few pages into it, I came across a really quite simple diagram of visualization that was titled existing assets and initiatives. The guide sort of starts at a point of, what do we have now. And there are a bunch of fairly typical elements on there, such as data's data systems, network elements. But then it goes on to include a wider range of our elements, such as mounting platforms, meaning things like buildings, and vehicles and streetlights. And when I hadn't seen before, street furniture, really sort of a outstanding inventory that coupled. What have we got? And what are we working on and coupled these sort of two data sets together at a high level. And the document itself outlines a fairly strong governance structure, and I think documents as well. And again, frankly, I'd encourage anyone who wants a little bit of a primer, or an example of a framework for supporting your own efforts, in terms of smart city type efforts, or digital city efforts, you know, review this document. So you know, quite frankly, actually my compliments to the city and your efforts and being a part to pull that together. Again, it's very well done. Within there. There's a section called formulize, master data strategy. And I liked it because it starts off, I think the very first sentence read Smart cities are driven by data. And that's a theme that I think sort of resonates through a lot of your efforts. So maybe with that brief synopsis of Philadelphia's Smart City PHL program and this guiding framework. Wondering, would you be able to give us an idea of what is the city really do with that on a day to day basis? What do you do to activate that plan, bring that strategy to life and really get some results out of that strategy?
Akshay Malik: So thanks for the overview plan, I think, I think the team that did it, I wasn't on the team that did it. But I was kind of in a Supporting Role from one of the departments that was participating in the development of this document. And I think it does do a good job of putting together sort of a vision for where we need to be and how we get there, the hence the roadmap name on it, there were elements to it. And I can take the first one that you that you brought up, which is master data strategy. There are elements in the in the city's operations or using data that currently sort of have a data strategy. But it's not like a formalized master data strategy sort of say, and we are bringing on board soon, a data fellow within the team, I am in a country to sort of work on formalizing that. So this document sort of laid the foundation of doing that kind of work. Now, there are other parts to it, that did culminate into, you know, ideas that we are taking forward. Like, I don't know, if you've got a chance to look at the pitching pilot, which is part of the strategy near in the document. That was a key initiative or program that we were able to find feet on very quickly. I mean, much before then we found our feet on master data strategy. Joanna head, she's my colleague on my team on the sponsor, the PHL team, she has been leading the effort on putting pitching pilot initiatives out. And what that does is essentially operationalizes. This this different way of looking at procurement of smart technology and piloting them. So it's like a reverse pitch concept where the city goes out and says, hey, this is what we need, in a short form of an RFP process and have a compressed format of an RFP process. It's still competitive bidding. And it goes through all the legal review that it needs to but it's essentially providing a shorter and more easier, efficient way to go out seek solutions that may fit our needs, and then test them out on a short term basis on a pilot basis. So hence the name pitch and pilot, we've been able to do some interesting projects with them. One of them was we piloted a technology that would go on our fleet vehicles and sort of do a LIDAR scan, I think of our street infrastructure like this, the roads and determine which one needs to be repaired first. So we prioritize our resources based on what's actually needed, which is heavily focused on data and data driven decision making. Then people saying, hey, that may need more based on historical understanding of things. So we've strategically moved away from those traditional ways and moved into these new data driven ways. Thanks to the pitch and pilot program. I want to give the first shameless plug here, which is we have an ongoing request of all the solutions for one of the pitch and pilot program, which is a program we're doing in partnership with SAP Which is for folks who don't know about Philly, the center is the regional transit agency that does manage the operations and, and own all the buses, trains and transit services all across the city in the region. And we were able to identify, like need for providing services for people with disabilities to access transit better. And this challenge that if you google set up for all challenge, that's the challenge that I'm talking about. And I hope listeners spread the word and we get more registrations because we just extended the deadline. The competition is essentially asking people to develop AR augmented reality solutions to improve access to transit, for SEPTA. And in partnership with SEPTA, we really test those ideas out the winners, obviously, in helping develop it beyond just the idea. So that's, that's one shameless plug I want to have here. That's an example of how we taking, you know, ideas and putting it through the framework that we spoke about and getting some good solutions.
Robert Moore: Excellent. Maybe just a clarifying question on your kitchen pilot program. You've got an open call right now, with regards to SEPTA. So folks who have an idea or a thought around innovation, they would pitch you, and then you down select into some sort of pilot program, is that sort of the logical sequence there?
Akshay Malik: Yes. So we put out a call for solution that this is our need. And the need necessarily, does not need to be fulfilled with a technical solution. We are currently working on a different pilot, which is around procuring meals for I think schools are one of those things, but it's essentially around procuring meals and connecting places that have access or food that may or may be about to go to waste can be put into this logistical plan that that then delivers food to where it needs to be and doesn't go waste. We've not really formed that I'm not sure what the state status is on the project. But we, we found that the solution may not live with like a technology company or a software. But we live with somebody doing a nonprofit that may be doing that locally already. Right. And we have, I should say, qualitative knowledge of the landscape, more so than the ability to develop a fancy software. And that's where I think there's discussions at around that Smart cities solutions may not require a technical solution does not necessarily need to be something that is coming out of computer, or is technology to sort of say.
Robert Moore: Agreed, very interesting. And is pitch and pilot something that runs city wide, or is that just within the department of innovation?
Akshay Malik: So it's managed by department of innovation, which I'm part of right now. It's called Smart HO group. It's just three of us right now. We partner with several agencies, in this case, the scepter program, we partnered with SEPTA, and OTIS, which is my other half of the agency, which I also sort of worked with the leadership of Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. That was my previous role with the city. And essentially, we brought the challenge to set that like, hey, we have this pool of money, and we have this, this opportunity, what would you want to do, and sat down with us work together with this innovation team and pitching talent team to put this challenger
Robert Moore: Got it? Okay, great. That's interesting. That's, that's a very innovative approach to solving problems. And if we think about it, the theme of Smart Cities, right, frankly, I think, a smart approach. And it's interesting, because it feels like it really lets you bring forth the problems or challenges that are within the city and bring forth what's most important. Curious, is that process is very interesting is that what is that a Philadelphia way of solving problems or sort of a unique approach to do all organically grew that within Philadelphia, or, and I'm asking from the sense of talking with other folks within other cities, sometimes the manner in which they solve problems, you can very much see what I'll call the spirit of the city brought forth some folks Hey, we're looking outward, very much looking outwardly to see what other folks have done and some folks more grassroots, homegrown. Let's identify and go from there.
Akshay Malik: I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I would say this that. I mean, I don't know where the original suspicion pile come from, because Alan Wong who was the Smart City director at the time, the Smart City road PHL roadmap was being the kind of manager on that that front node of she was basically managing the development of this, this roadmap. So I don't know where the inspiration came from. I don't know if that’s a Philadelphia thing. But I definitely see that if it works for us, it allows us to maneuver around some of the legacy ways of like doing things, essentially, where I mean, the traditional way we would go out is an RFP, right? Like where we would define, or the product, essentially saying, you do this starting here, and you end here, and this is how much money we have. Here, we have a different approach, which is we tell you the problem, we don't know what the solution looks like. And we have a small pool of money to test it out, essentially. And I think that bundled up coupled with the idea that we really want to hold the values listed in the roadmap together, that allows this approach to be, I don't know, they Philly or runs with the spirit of the city? I feel it works well here. So I don't know if that answered your question. But it.
Robert Moore: No, that's it. Certainly it certainly did. Josh, and Kevin, sort of I'd like to get your perspective, from each of you. Maybe not necessarily specific to Philadelphia. But each of you have a slightly different perspective. And right, as you all have worked with cities, as they try to innovate, lots of things come into play, whether they be on the technical side, technical policies, network architectures, data standards, or what I call the real world, the infrastructure of the city, as you've worked with customers, where do you find initiatives and the drive for innovation come from? Is it driven from within a particular city? Or more external? Are there external motivators that come into play? Maybe Kevin, if you want to take first stab at that?
Kevin Hood: That's a great question. The classic depends, but from a sales perspective, what we look for is what we use, maybe, Robert, what you're referring to is somebody like Ashkay, right? Somebody who has vision, and somebody who's a champion. And so we're looking for a champion who believes that analytics can make a difference, you know, so Visual Analytics is just part of that journey, you know, and then you build what you say there's the data and the things like that, that are core to all this, the government's that comes into play. And, and so we're just one aspect of that journey. And so really, when you can find those champions, that helps a lot for us, when it's at a higher level, that's the best case scenario. So we can get that executive buy in. And sometimes you need that you need somebody at the top to say, this is what we're doing. And, and don't leave a lot of Nuance to this. Because when Nuance is left, or they're just not committed, that's when we see you know, that those smarter city initiatives start to slow down or not happen at all. So I'll hand it over to Josh, for his perspective on that.
Josh Green: Yeah. So I feel like in kind of my work with different governments, and in groups like that, what I've often found is that innovation is coming from both ends, right, like Akshay mentioned that there's kind of this need to do more with less rate, budget constraints, austerity, and everything like that within state and local governments. And so, as they're looking for ways to, you know, find and implement new strategies are doing this more, right, what they're finding kind of available already existing externally to them, or these digital infrastructures that are more in say, the civil life of everyone, right. So things like being able to, especially when the pandemic had ordered groceries online and had those groceries shipped to your house, right, the ability to get a single source of information or truth in regards to a COVID data, like as Kevin mentioned, the portals we were all going to and looking up real time statistics and everything like that, right. So there's, I think, already impetus of this digital infrastructure that exists or Smart cities that as local governments have tried to do more with less, they've found ways of innovatively working within this infrastructure that already exists. That's things like adapting websites to mobile devices that their constituents and stakeholders already have. That's meeting the kind of operational requirements that the private sector they work with have things like making sure that construction companies or inspection companies for residential housing can make it and do their inspections in a timely manner using things like mobile forms or mobile data entry, stuff like that. So there's that internal drive to meet the budget constraints along with the external demand of constituent experiences that is driven by the kinds of technology that we find within cities. I feel like that's been kind of my general stake and I know Akshay mentioned, kind of Like, older styles of smart thinking, right? When we think about smart, we typically think about technology, we typically think of information and communication. But information and communication technology existed differently. Back in the day, it was more physical. It was from a urban government experience. It was things like parks, community centers, government buildings, all the places where you could feel that kind of constituent response and everything like that. And so as that shifts to new technology and everything like that, right, I like to kind of talk about distinguishing physically smart processes, with digitally smart processes, right. So as you understand the touch points, and all of the different areas that that residents are going to interact with you, right, you are always going to come up against a wall where there is someone who's just not digital, right? My sister does social work in our VA to provide housing for the houseless. Right? And so constantly, we talk about the fact that her clients have no mobile devices don't, or their mobile devices are not connected to the internet, right? They're not very internet savvy, and they don't even like going on to the internet constantly. Right? So how is that bridged? Or like how do we bridge that divide? Right? It's understanding that the physically smart processes there or the local institutions that actually mentioned the nonprofits, the community centers, the kind of care knowledge and practices that exist within the social workers, or the third sector, or even within the public or private sector themselves, right. So making sure that they then have the tools that they are empowered, that is the knowledge workers and the care workers that they're empowered to integrate into the digitally smart world. So for me, it's the physically smart is that learned experience, it's or sorry, that lived experience, it's, it's the kinds of information that you can't collect through data, you have to get it from someone's lived experience, right, and turning it into that learned experience. And that is where you collect the data. So both of them are evidence based approaches. Both of them are participatory, but one is coming from the lived experience, and one is coming from the experience. So I think it's important to integrate the kinds of technology that had that customer or citizen or resident centric approach, in order to understand that technology isn't always going to be the answer, but can be a part of the answer.
Robert Moore: Got it? Okay. Great. Thank you, Josh, actually, sort of teasing out a theme from Josh's comments on adaption to change and, and working with new challenges, I believe, and I think I've seen changes in the landscape of the city, landscape in a very broad sense. I think they happen at all sorts of velocities from years decades to very much faster type of velocities. Your cities pitch and pilot program sounds like a very innovative, adaptable type of process for bringing and bringing new initiatives to life bringing new innovation to address unforeseen challenges, any other examples, either from the Smart City PHL program or from within your own work that provide that sort of knit flexibleness?
Akshay Malik: Yeah. So before I joined the Smart cities, PHL team, I was with the agency, OTIS, Office Transportation Infrastructure and Sustainability. And there wasn't like I was in the last two projects are managed, were these grant funded projects. One of them is Vision Zero Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, which kind of used crash data released by the state to improve pedestrian infrastructure and to improve pedestrian safety across the board. And that was kind of part of the Vision Zero larger versions of your program in the city. The other interesting project that I worked on was something called Philadelphia's transportation roadmap. It's named under central Philadelphia congestion management or analysis plan on DVRPCs website. But it grew into was, Hey, there are these different agencies across the city that manage planning operations and management of overall management of transportation infrastructure in many ways, which included the city has different agencies within it streets department, license, inspection, etc. And then you have scepter, which is a regional agency and not within the city's sort of administrative umbrella. That's, that's operating the transit side of things. So the city owns the bus shelter, but the buses are owned and operated by sector. Now, that's like one interface. There was we? I don't know if you folks not from Philadelphia may not be aware, but we have the parking authority, the Philadelphia parking authority. That's a separate state run agency. So the city doesn't own the parking lot interesting. So similarly, we have a regional MPO, or planning agency that's regional. It's called DVRPC, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission that helps manage a lot of data driven analysis and planning of various kinds of things, including transportation infrastructure, they were part of this agency. This project, and leadership from all these large agencies, including small agencies, like the Business Improvement districts, centers, any district, University City district, as well, as we had partners from University of Pennsylvania, University of Tampa, the Temple University, academic thinkers leading the field of mobility and urban planning, we're participating here. And this whole project was about thinking about data as an infrastructure to manage transportation, essentially saying, you’re your scepter key, which is like your way to get into separate infrastructure is not just like scanning in for information about how you move around. And the classical thinking of a car on the street as a singular mode has to be translated into, say, different choices that you have. And those choices have different implications from land use perspective, from money perspective, from management of those choices perspective. For example, a car on the street could be your an Uber, that you are taking a ride in, it could be a regular taxi, that's was standing in the taxi lane, and you whistle new, and you asked for that taxi ride, it could be a zip car, which was parked in a zip car lot and has a different infrastructural requirement and data, data infrastructure behind it. Or it could be your own personal car that needs a garage in your house, right. So all these four choices are different, not just from the data infrastructures perspective, they have different connotations on a land use perspective, from their impact on greenhouse emissions perspective, what I'm trying to say is that we'll have to move away from the traditional thinking of a car is just a mode. And if you move away from the plumbing, and putting cars through this plumbing infrastructure, which is the road into a network, multi modal system, and to do that, we will need data infrastructure that connects all these different choices available to us in a way that lends itself to the best user experience. And you'll see that as a mean, as a goal of that study to understand how we can improve user experience because as a citizen, I don't actually care what is the inter relationship between SAP and city and the BBA, I don't care, what I want is from, for me to go from point A to point B, and I have certain priorities, and I want to make those choices or have the choice made for me or make that choice myself, based on certain priorities, my energy footprint might cost my time to travel, etc. So the infrastructure should provide you that in one piece, and not this Frankenstein of the infrastructure, right. And the way to do that would be data coming together to talk and be delivered through one application, which has been discussed in many circles as mobility as a service, we started exploring how that may look like in the city. But it's very early stages right now. But we do talk about it in the report that I just mentioned. That's one example.
Robert Moore: That was excellent. And if I could, I'm going to quote from that one study data as transportation infrastructure. And I think I think that is exactly what you're talking about. And really placing an emphasis on user experience, because you're right, as you walk us through that. Transportation is not only multi modal, but multi-jurisdictional. And then you have the roads and the plumbing and the different authorities and all sorts of stuff. But there's lots of way of driving, driving better user experience through good application of that data. Hey, Kevin. So Tableau is an organization that I'm going to simplify greatly and sort of take some Liberty here and say you're all about data. And so you know, you've seen cities like Philadelphia, moving into the realm of Smart cities, with new datasets being created. I think there's potentially older or legacy types of datasets that are out there more traditional data sets that are maybe traditionally have been a little siloed. Perhaps coming online, in one way or another, but with your expertise in data visualization, and analysis. Can you talk to us a bit about your experience, how you work with different cities, as Akshay was talking about to bring these datasets together in some way, these disparate sets of data, allow in you know, sort of individualization bane, allowing for them to be visualized in some manner and hopefully gleaning the insights or actionable initiatives out of those, whether it be for policymaking decisions or resident or citizen consumption, whatever that might look like. But any thoughts around that?
Kevin Hood: Yeah, there is actually, I can probably attest to the disparate data sources, the frequency, all the new areas of data sources with digital devices and things like that, sensors, things like that. Looking at ebikes, when they're available, darker lists, I, you know, transportation alternatives just, it never ends. And I, I think our approach and what we've seen with customers, and as a former consultant who used to work in something called data warehousing, where we built this huge monstrosity that took forever. To pull all this data together, what we've seen now is that there's technology out there to help support not having to really do all that, but take the pieces, and we do these things called virtualize it and then make it available for tools like Tableau to digest and display to the different stakeholders. So whether it's somebody bringing in in on a mobile device, or looking at the website and city of Philadelphia, or if they want to see, you know, where's the closest e bike or something like that, or even, you know, at the state level, you know, they want to look up, what's the DMV, wait time at this office, you know, because I want to go in and renew my license. All behind that the underpinning of all that is all the different data sources going on. It is a level of effort to get there. One thing I always tell my clients, probably more on my consulting side is that, you know, don't wait to have every piece of data source brought in. Because if you think about it, they're almost starting from zero. And if you can bring in a couple of data sources, you've already made great strides and gains, there's insights being captured immediately. Don't wait five years, and then start doing your analysis and analytics. And so that's really our message to clients. And it's those cities that embrace that, that are farther down that analytics journey. So but I'm not going to, I won't discount that there is a level of effort because of the multitude of data sources out there as is actually dealing with constantly. And we empathize with that. And we give you the tools to help out with that not only ours, but our partners. And as well as just bringing in people consulting groups that they focus on that stuff to help out Akshay and other groups to, to get them along. Because a lot of times, it's actually just mentioned with budget, reasons, resource constraints and things like that, which I'm sure you're familiar with, you know, sometimes you have to supplement that if you're trying to get something out the door quicker. And so that's, that's kind of what we see out there quite a bit. So you know, my advice is, don't wait to build this huge gonna capture everything, it's going to be all 316 Kumbaya, you know, that's a that is a iterative process. That takes a lot of time, because as soon as you get that done, you have 10 more data sources you're dealing with now.
Robert Moore: And so Kevin, following on to that, that sounds like a good best practice of, hey, don't wait till you've got that perfected data set or perfected set of data sets, right? That's the project that you might never get to the end to other best practices that you might recommend. You mentioned, your DMV, wait time experience, right, that's a near time or real time data analysis, presentation of data analysis, right? Recommendations around that, how organizations can bring that data closer sooner in terms of getting the value out of it?
Kevin Hood: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of just goes back to, you know, there's kind of three things, there's people processes and technologies for everything. It's what I actually was getting at whether or not he knew he was saying, right. And it's the people in process are the 90% of it. And then the 10% is the technology. And so what we always say, for the case in it from a DMV perspective, you know, that experience was just let's identify what we're trying to achieve for our citizens, right, and then move back from that, right, get the end goal, move back from that, and if we're missing a few data sources here or there, again, if you can at least get 80% of what are you know, she's let's go with 60%. Now, I think about it, you know, that is valuable to people, right? That is insight, and then meet them where they're at, right? So whether that's on the website, or they can pull it up on their mobile device, and make it easy to digest. That's where Tableau really excels, right? It's just, oh, wow, yeah. Oh, this is my city. That's my address. That's my location. There's my DMV, or even when I log in, we could pick up their coordinates, right, where are they located from an XY coordinate perspective that location awareness transfers right into the visualization. And you know, actually is now looking at the DMVs closest to him and the wait times. It starts with the vision and then you back end with but again, you know, I would say just get a wind out there initially. And then continue to add to it, because it's always an iterative process. And I'm sure Josh sees that all the time from his perspective as well.
Robert Moore: Yeah. So Josh, maybe following on to that, I think that maybe is something that you see. And I think we've touched on this the phenomenon of as a group, I think there are technologists out there that love technology, right? The shiny new technology is great, who doesn't love a new phone or smart home device or whatever it might be? And maybe with, I think there was a wave of smart city activity, an initial sort of wave that was all about the technology and implementation and getting it out there and, but at the core, really about the technology. And I think sometimes technologists tend to assume everybody understands the benefit this technology is going to deliver. But I think actually, it was hitting the nail on the head when you said, Hey, me, as a citizen, me as a resident, I may, I'm interested in my experience. And so Josh, you know, I think we've seen probably some measurable, probably some, like anecdotal data on users or consumers, you know, one of the biggest challenges they have is whether it be the look in the feel of the content, isn't friendly of the digital services that they consume, or it's lacking in some manner, maybe it lacks a professional look are hard to navigate hard to find what they're using, right, particularly if they're maybe not a native technologist. And coupled with that, I think there's rising expectations from citizens on delivery of services from government, I think government is doing more for citizens now than they ever were. And the price of success is, is greater demand, so to say, and, Josh, can you give us an example of something you've been involved in, that really helped bring together what are called the needs or demands of citizens, to know where to go, how to find the right content, find the right data that they were looking for, for whatever their purpose was, but really transform that digital experience into something that they can consume, without having to, you know, something they can consume from their phone from the website, but readily consumable as opposed to a research project.
Josh Green: Perfect, yes. So, um, you know, we talked about the user experience, we talked about the disparate data and everything like that, right. And so, Adobe's big approach to that user experience is the kind of trifold approach of data content and delivery, right. So I always like to imagine it as the recycle symbol, right? How does that data feed into the kinds of content that you create and make available? And how are you delivering it to it? So what touchpoints? And how are they consuming it, which, as you mentioned, is going to give us new data sets that's going to inform our content, etc., etc. Right. So I think the multi jurisdiction issue is actually a really interesting one, right. And so, you know, we worked with one department of transportation agency where it's like, they're trying to disseminate information that has to do with traffic that has to do with road conditions that has to do with construction and everything like that, that's going to relate to them. But you know, you're going to have saved the Department of Public Works, doing the actual work on the infrastructure, the roads and everything like that. You may have other groups responsible for other parts of that civil engineering with the traffic light system, and traffic congestion, and everything like that. So however, again, as a constituent, I don't care about all of those things, right. So when I think Where's traffic, and I'm thinking, I'm going to go to the government to do it, my first thought is, I'm going to go to the Department of Transportation website, right. So what this particular agency and for sake of confidentiality, I don't know if I can describe who it was, unfortunately. But essentially, what the idea was how do we kind of grab these information, these news updates from multiple agencies. So when the Department of Public Works has gone and say, fixed a pothole or done maintenance on a road that the Department of Transportation wasn't even aware of? Right, it wasn't a request of theirs, it was a request directly to the public works, or even to get into the kind of private sector, the kinds of traffic and updates that the private infrastructure of the media has the traffic copters, the traffic cameras and everything like that. And so collecting these disparate sources and providing them on the main de IoT website is kind of Like a news aggregate feed was, I think one of those situations in using artificial intelligence to do things like geo locate, right. So I'm not logging in in Richmond, Virginia and getting traffic updates for Northern Virginia. If anyone's ever been to Virginia, those are incredibly different traffic circumstances. So I would never in a million years care about the traffic conditions in Richmond while driving through Northern Virginia. So geo locating, doing things like, you know, actually, me personally, I am a nerd who likes to see all of the different government agencies involved in Policymaking. So if there was a little tag on it, for me that said, well, this came from this source, this came from this source you, I know you're interested in this. So here's some more information from you. So leveraging things like artificial intelligence, analytics, gathering geolocation, to present not only the news of all these disparate sources, but the relevant news, the news that actually made a difference to those folks logging on. And actually, my favorite part about it is the website was mobile responsive to so when you loaded it on your phone, you would be hit with a very different look and feel, but it tracks your GPS going over a certain mile per hour, it assumed you were driving your vehicle, and would ask you to enter the website when you were no longer driving your car. So I thought that was a really neat, personalized experience that was able to be gathered through the data collected on these individuals and then delivered to them through content that was relevant in this particular situation shared the branded experience, the agency experience of that DOT website.
Robert Moore: Perfect. And so safety first, I love that as somebody with two student drivers in the household, it is a theme that we see around her all the time, maybe for our listeners actually describe to us the host of jurisdictions and organizations that have physical presence within the Philadelphia region. But I just like to point out there is something called the Open Data Philly catalog. It's sort of a data repository that includes datasets from really from a regional basis from all sorts of data sets from organizations that extend beyond the city itself. I like it, because it really shows the community embracing data share. We're starting to come up on time here. So I thought maybe I just asked each one of you one last question. Maybe this would be more of a personal reflection, but I find it's generally close out these sorts of discussions on sort of leave people is something good to think about questions fairly easy. What do you excited about? What are you looking forward to over the next six to 12 months? I know, coming out of last six to 12 months, we've been in some strange times. But I think we've got lots of opportunity ahead of us. But Josh, maybe starting with you, where do you see new and innovative things in the next six to 12 months?
Josh Green: I'm personally just excited for, I guess, to look at the silver lining, right, the increased use of web services and online communication that came as a result of savvy the physical divide that arose out of this pandemic rate, and the ways that opens the door for more participatory forms of government right for having my voice heard and recognized within government policymaking itself.
Robert Moore: Kevin, what about you next 6, 12 months anything on the horizon that excites you?
Kevin Hood: Yeah, I will back out of the innovation for a second and say, I'm really happy to see that the federal government's investing in helping out states and cities. I mean, that is exciting for me, for my customers, and, and that they're now not going to be so after their hands tied and huge infrastructure bill is coming out and things like that. And so I'm really excited to see where we can go from just not only energy answering the what is happening, you know, the classic, you know, tracking this or that, but to what might be happening in the future, I get a little more into the predictive things with trying to predict traffic patterns, or, you know, best way to personalize things as Josh mentioned, you know, well, you know, wherever, if he's near, you know, the Starbucks, you know, maybe we throw him a coupon or something like that, right. So just starting to expand that analytics journey. And I think with the investment that's going to come down from the Fed is exciting for us from a Tableau perspective.
Robert Moore: Okay, fantastic. And actually, if we can get your thoughts and maybe if you have something else that you'd like to shamelessly plug you gave us your setup pitch and pilot shameless plug, but if you'd like to make another shameless plug the floor is yours.
Akshay Malik: The second shameless plug is there's a design competition that is open for submissions right now that I've been part of it's called Rack Them Up. Rack as in R-A-C-K-E-M UP, U-P dot bike. If you just Google that it's easy to find. It's a competition that's come together because of the funding that I worked to get initially a grant funded project. And then we partnered with BPA that came up with this idea. Karina Tolson, Executive Deputy Executive Director at BPA, she was the one who came up with this idea and we found money. We've been working with WTS Women in Transportation with the with in terms of organizing the whole competition, we've been putting the whole thing together, we have essentially the competition is to find designs that we can put in front of fire hydrants that way we reduce illegal parking in front of fire hydrants, hence making access to fire hydrants for firefighters easier, and improving the bike parking infrastructure in the city by an exponential amount. So we're looking for prototyping that through this design competition. So that's the second shameless plug. And we are coming up with another two weeks, we'll have two weeks or so we'll have a launch of another project called Smart block PHL. That's in Midtown village in Philadelphia, where we're testing out. It's a pilot project, again, where we are testing out new technology that uses sensors to detect count people on the street have it has environmental sensors to detect temperature, humidity of things. And it all uses something called edge computing, that basically allows us to do all these things without infringing on anybody's privacy. So citizens privacy is safe. We've also put together a task force to look at, if any of these technologies that we're putting out is harming privacy at all. That's also in the works. So all the work that we kind of putting together is going to have some checks and balances around it, we'll have industry experts look at it and say is this good, bad or ugly in terms of best practices around AI and use of sensors. And lastly, I think it's helping us think through a contracting process they well, of how to procure or put these new infected things on the street. So that's the exciting stuff in the near future.
Robert Moore: Fantastic. Thank you very much. And I look forward to checking in with each of you in the not too distant future. To hear about how each of these are going. I would like to extend a big thank you to each of you for your time and your participation today. It's much appreciated. I know you're all busy. There's a lot of demands on each of your time. So a heartfelt thanks to each of you. For our listeners, we've been speaking with Josh Green carousel technology, Kevin Hood with Tableau Software, and Akshay Malik, who is the infrastructure innovation coordinator at the City of Philadelphia. My name is Robert Moore. Thanks so much to everyone for joining us today. Have a good rest of your week and have your summer please stay safe and healthy. Bye. Bye, everyone.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft Adobe and Tableau can assist your city, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at SLGSales@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.