Jason Lally has been appointed deputy director of Data Services and Engineering at the Office of Data and Innovation (ODI), where he has been deputy chief data officer since 2022. ODI works with multiple state departments and agencies, including the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the California Department of Technology, the Department of Cannabis Control, the Employment Development Department and the California Department of Public Health.
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In his new role, Lally will work with Joy Bonaguro, the state’s chief data officer. Lally succeeded Bonaguro in her previous role as the chief data officer for the city and county of San Francisco, the role she held before joining state government in January 2020.
Lally subsequently held several positions in the Government Operations Agency from 2021 to 2022, including deputy chief data officer and special consultant. He had several positions at DataSF in San Francisco from 2014 to 2021, including chief data officer, data services manager and Open Data Program manager. Lally was a Mayor’s Innovation Fellow at the San Francisco Mayor’s Office from 2013 to 2014, and before that he held several positions at PlaceMatters from 2008 to 2013.
In a LinkedIn post last week, Lally wrote: “Very honored to take on this role and excited for 2023!! We're going to do really great things with a great team ... .”
In a February 2020 interview with Government Technology, sister publication to Industry Insider — California, Lally discussed the work he and Bonaguro did in San Francisco.
“Our goal [at the time] really was to take that original policy idea [of open data] and institutionalize it into the way we do our work,” Lally said. “My job really was to bring process and automation wherever we could to make open data as easy and accessible as possible.”
Summing up his philosophy on data’s use in government, he said in that interview: “We’ve done a pretty good job at making our data available ... but what does it mean in context? How do these things relate to one another? So we’re really trying to do more of that for our city staff and analysts, but also for the public, for our internal and external users alike.”
Lally holds a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and technology from Pennsylvania State University and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
