This blog post was written by Mathilde Bras from Numéricité, and first published on their website. Mathilde was part of the Public Digital team who worked on this project with the City of Brussels.

For several years, the City of Brussels has been carrying out a complete transformation of its administrative services. With the BXL20/21 project, the aim is to bring together all city staff into a new administrative centre to open to citizens by 2022 and develop several key projects: a new staff organisation, the launch of new digital services, and a smart city roadmap. In this context, the City of Brussels identified a need to strengthen its “data capacities'' in support of this transformative project. With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Public Digital and NumeriCité joined forces to engage with the Brussels teams to develop a data strategy.

We had two main challenges :

• Articulate a data strategy aligned with the city’s priorities (including the smart city’s priorities)

• Build a concrete and outcome-based roadmap and involve appropriate stakeholders in the digital transformation

We worked with a core team from the Organisation Department and the Smart City unit, as well as members of i-CITY, the IT department.

We developed a three phase engagement:

• Data maturity assessment: based on a series of 20 interviews of key stakeholders from the city’s business departments and cross-functional departments, and one workshop to share findings, we built an analysis of the city’s strengths and opportunities in terms of data. This assessment helped us identify thematic priorities to draft the strategy

• Data strategy elaboration: we facilitated four working sessions to collaboratively design the city's vision in terms of data and articulate objectives, new services, new roles and organisations, new governance systems. Each working session gave the core team sufficient material and good practices to be autonomous to draft the strategy. When necessary, we gave input to go into further detail.

• Roadmap and Show & Tell: we built a 2 year roadmap to guide the city of Brussels to implement the data strategy. At the end of the engagement, we gathered all the stakeholders to share results and case studies of data-driven projects.