The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE), Employment and Training Division (E&T) is modernizing their workforce longitudinal database with a diverse set of data. The project’s primary outcome is to create a common repository from disparate data streams that coalesce into a powerful tool that can be queried, researched, and enhanced to generate revolutionary, custom, data-driven services for Colorado citizens.

Colorado has been working on building a data lake, data warehouse, and Business Intelligence suite so that data can be easily stored, managed, modeled and queried. Additionally, the team is upskilling in data analysis, data engineering, and data visualizations, ensuring that they are ready when the updated system comes online.

This presentation will provide insight into the journey of building a data team and infrastructure from the ground up: choosing data tools, creating a data infrastructure, and building a data team. Join us to gain insights into our successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Gain insights into the journey of data infrastructure implementation and data culture change
• Learn how we gained executive buy-in for data infrastructure change
• Understand how to train a non-technical team in data analysis and visualization