Promoting Efficiency With Data: Two Case Studies

In Chicago, Open Data Improves Food Safety

Issue: Public Spending

Like many communities, Chicago has an abundance of restaurants — more than 15,000, in fact — and a proportionally small number of inspectors, just 36, to monitor food safety. Previously, those numbers almost ensured that officials would overlook critical food safety hazards at restaurants citywide, putting public health at risk.

Open data, however, now helps inspectors pinpoint high-priority safety violations, which saves precious time and resources. To begin modernizing the city’s approach, analysts from the Department of Public Health and the Department of Technology and Innovation teamed up with volunteer data scientists from Allstate to collect information from various Chicago data sources, such as food inspection history, weather records and 311 calls.

From there, the group identified nine variables that often forecast critical violations and developed an algorithm that predicts which restaurants are most likely to fail food-safety inspections. The algorithm quickly proved effective. During a pilot phase, for instance, it helped inspectors identify 69% of critical violations early — compared to just 55% revealed early using the traditional method. From a calendar day perspective, the algorithm helped inspectors find major food-safety hazards nearly eight days sooner across a 60-day period.

By using open data already available on Chicago’s data portal, the research team jump-started the project in two weeks, rather than suffer a longer contractual process to give Allstate volunteers access to nonpublic city information. The inspection algorithm proved so effective that Chicago made the project code open source, allowing other city departments to use it for their own safety monitoring.

Widescale Data Strategy Helps Nuclear Regulators Maintain Facilities

Issue: Infrastructure Management

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has weighty responsibilities, including overseeing roughly 44,000 federal and contractor employees and operating a vast, complex portfolio of contractor-run labs, manufacturing and production facilities, and other infrastructure. Each site generally uses its own location-specific maintenance management software — which is fine at the site level, but doesn’t give NNSA an overall risk picture.

To address this challenge, the agency teamed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop the BUILDER Sustainment Management System. It integrates each site’s existing processes into a single, standardized network that helps NNSA make proactive, enterprisewide decisions. The new strategy is similar to looking through the front windshield, an NNSA official said, rather than in the rearview mirror.

This article appeared in our guide, “Building Government’s Data Toolbox: Practical Uses for Data and Insights.” For more on how agencies are making real change using data, download it here:

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay