2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

16 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
data. 4 Although data on properties and physical aspects of a community
were the initial focus of most GIS applications, other types of addressbased
data (such as data on crimes, new business licenses, or the residences
of public-assistance recipients) are now just as common.
The institutional implications of these changes within local governments
have varied. The amount of automated information on social service
clients has expanded markedly. Social service programs that offer
case management may have electronic records on each of their clients,
with information on what happened during and after each of their many
interactions, as well as a host of other descriptive information about them.
Agencies that maintain confidential information on individuals maintain
close control of their own records, although efforts to integrate such
data across programs have been under way recently in some places—see
discussion of integrated data systems (IDS) in chapter 4.
Local government data that are a matter of public record (such as
information on properties), however, have been more likely to be centralized
institutionally. In her essay, Fleming notes
Independent, stand-alone, single-department programs have given way to an enterprise
approach whereby core datasets are developed, harmonized and made available
for use by all service departments across the local government organization.
In earlier stages of automation, when records were stored on mainframe
computers, department staff who needed to work with the data
often faced long waits for limited hard copy reports from a central
computer unit. An enormous boost in government productivity came
when desktop computers were networked so staff could access the database
directly to look up facts, perform analyses, and initiate appropriate
updates. Many local governments have yet to adopt a full enterprise
approach, but the trend is clearly toward more data sharing across
departments. Chapter 3 discusses the more recent trend of local governments
distributing data through centralized open data portals, which
could spur a similar increase in governments’ internal use of data.
Individual departments use the transactional records they produce
in several ways. Maintaining official records with integrity is in itself a
mission. The work entails not only updating records accurately as transactions
occur (such as changing records on ownership when a property
sale takes place), but making such information accessible to the public
in an efficient way.
For individual departments, however, probably the most universal
use of these data is basic program management: tracking to find out if