The City of Tacoma Advances Data Innovation and Public Safety

I'm Enzhou Wang. I'm the chief data officer at City of Tacoma. For City of Tacoma, I think the high level mission is to provide high quality, innovative, cost effective municipal services, right, to all the, city residents. In addition to regular city services, city of Tacoma actually also have Tacoma public utilities, including power, water, and rail, which is very unique. Data supported decision making is big part of the city's, overall strategic initiative in terms utilizing more data to inform, many of our decisions

Our CTO, chief technology officer, Grace, have done a great work with the team, really lead the the transformation. Right? Move a lot of the SAP analytics data into in Snowflake. Many, department users actually are innovating on, Snowflake.

Right? It's outside the work the IT department doing. Some teams utilizing, like, a machine learning, using Snowflake, some using the new streamlit features to develop applications, and others are looking at, like, building third party applications on top of Snowflake. I think for city of Tacoma, really, we are trying to use data to promote and improve the resident safety and their well-being.

Last year, we launched Tacoma Police Department dashboard that has been very successful and, really helped Tacoma Police Department to promote transparency and accountability.

And that is built on on Snowflake. Because that project, we, City of Tacoma actually become the first user of Snowflake of the the, CJIS compliant account. Right? Criminal justice information account.

That is a big step because that's, the CJIS compliance is really important for police data, and I already know some other cities reach out to us regarding they have interest to put more, police data on Snowflake. I think one great advantage is the data sharing feature within Snowflake. For example, if an agency, they use Snowflake, if they want to share data, within Snowflake with us, it's only a couple click away. We are looking at, adopting enterprise generative AI, platform maybe later in the year, and I'm really hoping we can actually connect that with Snowflake.

Right? So that within the Gen Gen AI tools, whether it's chat or some other interface, you can easily ask questions about data. It actually can retrieve data from snow Snowflake and answer those questions. I think that definitely will make a big difference.

I think that there are, new features we're definitely taking advantage of. For example, dynamic tables and, Cortex, or Copilot is a little bit new, and we definitely want to take advantage of those.