Operation Bold Blue Line Solution
ODGA and the Operation Bold Blue Line Dashboards
Thursday, July 27, 2023
About the Office of Data Governance and Analytics (ODGA)
The ODGA partners with Commonwealth agencies and public institutions to maximize the value of Commonwealth data through strategic governance, secure and appropriate data sharing, and enterprise analytics services informing actionable intelligence. The office is led by the Chief Data Officer for the Commonwealth of Virginia and is made up of a team full of talented professionals.
What prompted collaboration of the Commonwealth with the ODGA?
This collaboration was a part of Operation Bold Blue Line, a Governor’s initiative, to identify and reduce violent crime in 13 specific Virginia localities.
What was the ODGA's role in Operation Bold Blue Line?
The ODGA was engaged to manage the data collection and consolidation for Operation Bold Blue Line to support the resulting analytics. The data processing and management is hosted within the ODGA infrastructure. A key outcome will be increasing the reporting frequency on datasets that localities normally report to the Virginia State Police (VSP) from once a month to weekly at minimum. The ODGA was to be responsible for the presentation and visual layers of data analytics leveraged by the Governor’s Cabinet and Violent Crime Task Force to make critical business decisions that can benefit constituents in these areas. For instance, where the data shows areas of higher crime, increased law enforcement can be allocated, and the effectiveness of the increased police presence can be measured.
Targeted localities are:
- Chesapeake
- Danville
- Emporia
- Lynchburg
- Martinsville
- Newport News
- Norfolk
- Petersburg
- Portsmouth
- Richmond
- Roanoke
- Hampton
- Hopewell
What technologies or processes are being used in this project?
The ODGA Team worked with a combination of Data Warehouses and Azure SQL databases to receive data to create Power BI dashboards that showed a variety of violent crime statistics.
Does this project make the Commonwealth more efficient?
ODGA was able to combine 13 localities’ data into one clear and concise dashboard. While using the dashboard, Commonwealth leadership can view weekly updates that allow for the most informed decision-making regarding law enforcement resources and violent crime prevention.
ODGA worked with a many different partners to create the Operation Bold Blue Line Dashboards, including the Virginia State Police, which was an instrumental agency in the project. A staff member from the Virginia State Police commented on working with the ODGA team, stating “ODGA was able to work with our crime repository vendor to setup SFTP/FTP transmission of files on the cadence of our choice to update the table/visual dashboards easily.”