Replicating Urban Analytics Use Cases: Conceptual Shortcomings, Implementation Challenges, and Recommendations for the Field

Abstract

At a 2016 meeting of leading municipal analytics practitioners and experts at the Harvard Kennedy School, Johns Hopkins GovEx’s then-director of advanced analytics, Carter Hewgley, assessed the opportunities for analytics replication: “The good news is that problems and opportunities in U.S. cities are similar, meaning there is unending replication potential,” he said. The bad news was that lack of good protocols for use case discovery, challenges accessing and standardizing data, and uneven investment in data-literate human capital make analytics use cases difficult to generalize and import into different cities. At a time when the value of predictive analytics is widely recognized as a tool for better decision making and “chief data officer” is an increasingly common title in municipal government, cities still face the same challenges adopting analytical models into routine operations they have faced for decades.