Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg: on Technology

Mitch Daniels: Business-minded technocrat uninterested in social issues

In working on his opponents campaign, I began to realize what had made Daniels a formidable opponent- and such a highly effective governor that some national conservatives saw him as their best hope in challenging President Obama. He was a business minded technocrat, with very little interest in the social issues that were used to rile up electoral bases in campaign years but left communities divided long after their political usefulness expired. Instead, he was extremely focused on economic issues and interested in making government work well, even achieving the improbable feat of reforming the Bureau of Motor Vehicles into an efficient and user-friendly customer service organization. (Since the BMV is the one state office that virtually every citizen uses, it was also a politically clever thing to do.)

Pete Buttigieg: Set up 311 phone system for easier contact to city services

Fresh from a job in management consulting, I had promised during the campaign to set up a 311 system, so residents wouldn't have to figure out the relevant department in order to report a pothole or get a streetlight fixed. When the 311 center opened, we gained something more valuable than a new mechanism for customer service; for the first time, South Bend had a central, constantly updated data set on what people were calling about. Using that data, the city was able to make countless operational improvements, from cutting the time it took to get a pick-up by our trash crews, to simplifying the way residents paid their water bills.

Pete Buttigieg: Created city data map of infrastructure and road assets

Thinking back to his youth on the street department, one councilman was skeptical. "You have this technology to tell you which streets need repair," he said. "But if your foreman's any good, he ought to already know that off the top of his head!" Admittedly, the councilman had a point. One of the reasons we had qualified, experienced individuals in organizations is to use their intuition and expertise to solve problems.

For all the power that data analysis represents, it also has its limitations, and the potential for mischief. You might spend lots of time and resources gathering data that will never be used, or accumulate data that winds up telling you things you already know.