City of The Hague announced as winning team of The Leadership Challenge with Data Analytics (LCDA) 2022 fall edition. They developed a prototype for data-driven support and visualization exploring the impacts of population growth and policy measures on quality of life for neighbourhoods in the context of strengthening the cities’ resiliency. An expert jury of both academics and businesspeople considered their case best among the four pitches.

The chairperson of the jury, associate professor dr. Jan van Dalen, announced the winning team during the closure event of ECDA’s leadership challenge with data analytics programme. The 7th edition of the team training programme Leadership Challenge with Data Analytics was joined by four participating teams from City of Rotterdam, City of The Hague, ING and a team of Erasmus University Rotterdam real estate & facilities. Over a period of four months, they diligently worked on their own use cases through a learning-by-doing approach and coached by both top academic coaches and expert business consultants. The final pitch session took place in the Erasmus Data Collaboratory.

In the morning session prof. Eric van Heck discussed organizational digital transformation challenges, to put the use case into a wider perspective. Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen, Co-Founder and CEO at DAIN Studios shared insights from practice and moderated an in-class exercise to assess participants’ data & AI capabilities maturity. She also joined as one of the judges in the afternoon.

Data-driven support for policy makers as winning use case

The proof of concept developed by a team from the City of The Hague focused on supporting policy makers in assessing the impacts of policies on quality of life on neighbourhood level. Team members Nathalie Venema, Alex Schipperheijn, Nicole Huesken, Martine Wester, Lotte Sluyser en Juriën Stam work for different departments in the municipality, but joined forces for the leadership challenge.

“The impact of population growth can become a big societal problem for the municipality of the Hague. The quality of life the municipality strives for in all neighbourhoods can get under pressure. One goal of the POC was to support the discussion with the city council based on facts and figures. The other goal is to support the Resilience department in visualizing where and when it will hurt and how policy choices can impact these societal concerns”, says Nathalie Venema, data officer bedrijfsvoering municipality of The Hague.

For this purpose, the team combined several open data sets and visualized these on a map of the City of The Hague. Martine Wester, data scientist of in the team of The Hague said “Based on reference norms it was calculated how many citizens per district in a given year were (predicted to be) in need of a school or doctor and how many of those were serviced by the schools or doctors in the own district. The number of people not being serviced were plotted on the map per district in different colour codes. Linear programming was used as optimization technique to calculate the need and possible shortages. Next to these features the tool also allows for exploring the impact of different scenarios and choices”.

Juriën Stam, coördinator Urban Data Center The Hague: “The prototype developed during the LCDA programme taught us that it can be the basis for a lot more resilience use cases. By combining different (open) data sets in a clear visualization you can really support decision making in cities and regions. The prototype developed in the context of the training is expected to be scaled up and put into practice within the organization. With this app we contribute in our city to goal 3 (good health & wellbeing) and 4 (quality of education) of UN Sustainable Goals.”

The other participating teams developed initial prototypes focused on predicting crimes on neighbourhood level (team city of Rotterdam), using data to assess availability of study places on campus Erasmus University Rotterdam (team EUR real estate) and creating a prototype that predicts income and expense patterns and supports customers in financial decision making (team ING).

An expert jury

The teams pitched their use cases to the jury in the presence of their sponsoring executives. The jury consisted of five academic coaches from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, four consultants from PA Consulting and Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen (Dain Studios) as visiting expert speaker. Academic members: professor Evert Stamhuis, associate professor dr. Jan van Dalen (chairperson), associate professor dr. Dion Bongaerts;  associate professor dr. Matthijs Cosemans and dr. Haydee Sheombar. Business coaches from PA Consulting: Ernst Brand, Hans Roelfsema, Roxana Saraby and Pim Masselink.

The programme

The LCDA programme is a holistic 4-month training programme enabling participating teams to gain a holistic perspective on the use and impact of data, digitalization and AI. As part of the programme they are trained in business and communication skills, agile way of innovating, and their understanding of privacy, security, ethics and accountability is boosted. To demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge and to practice their skills, the teams have to turn a challenge from their organization into a proof of concept, using real data from their own organisation and pitching a proof of concept at the end of the programme to an expert jury. A coaching trajectory is part of the programme. The next edition of the programme will start in September 2022, a detailed schedule can be found here.

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