Establishing a Central Data Function at a Public Agency

Using data insights to make decisions is what every organization seeks to do, but there are many reasons why this doesn’t happen in practice: data is hard to find, it is siloed and inaccessible, it is undocumented and difficult to understand, it is too large or complex for the skills and tools available. All these problems existed at Metropolitan Transportation Authority

(MTA) and were the motivation for the recent establishment of a central data team, which has the goal of facilitating analytical work for teams all across the company. Standing up such a team is challenging, especially for public sector agencies with many internal and external stakeholders, legacy systems and limited resources. In this talk, Andy Kuziemko, who leads the Data & Analytics team at the MTA, will describe the progress to date at the agency, lessons learned along the way, and the remaining challenges the agency faces.