A leader in open data, education, community-building, and civic innovation, Jeanne Holm is the Deputy Mayor for the City of Los Angeles. She brings technical innovations to 4 million people. Her work in Los Angeles focuses on delivering great city services like 311, public television, social media, and public-private collaborations for technology innovations ranging from data science to broadband. She founded the Data Science Federation, which connects 17 universities and hundreds of students to solve the city’s big challenges using data-driven approaches.
During the initial outbreak of COVID-19, Holm navigated a sea of new work assignments while simultaneously guiding the city through the unprecedented challenges the pandemic placed on municipal services. In May 2020, Holm was named the city’s chief data officer. She served as adviser and CDO until November, when she was named deputy mayor for budget and innovation, overseeing the city’s annual budgeting process as well as the mayor’s plans to bridge the digital divide and engineer the city’s fiscal recovery.
The pandemic, Holm says, has hastened roughly “five or six years of IT acceleration” in a year—prompting a re-examination of online services, an e-payment consolidation, and partnering with governments including San Jose, CA on issues such as eviction moratoriums. One key initiative is the Angeleno Card, designed to aid COVID-impacted households while offering a single sign-on across city services. This sign-on enables contactless connections to city government and also includes a banking component. Holm also ran, effectively, a pilot strategy for mass remote work in 2019 for the city’s 311 call center, which helped ease the transition of the entire department going remote when the pandemic hit. Furthermore, Holm and the city are working to increase network capacity and bring highspeed broadband into public housing—free for six months and discounted thereafter.
As the former evangelist for Data.Gov for the Executive Office of President Obama and the U.S. White House, Holm led collaboration and built communities with the public, educators, developers, and governments in using open government data. She has been a senior consultant with the World Bank, where she was the lead for open data for Africa and empowering governments and civil society to use open data to increase prosperity and civic good. She was the chief knowledge architect at NASA, where she drove innovation through collaborative systems, knowledge sharing, and social platforms. She architected systems and managed teams from the award-winning NASA public portal to pioneering knowledge architectures within the U.S. Department of Defense.
An alumna of and doctoral candidate in CGU’s Information Systems & Technology Program, Holm is a distinguished instructor at UCLA and teaches courses in knowledge management, big data, and civic innovation in underserved communities in Los Angeles. She is a fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics, the director of two startups, and has authored more than 130 articles about innovation, open data, information systems, and knowledge management. She serves on boards for a wide variety of social enterprises.
Holm received her master’s degree in Management of Information Systems from CGU in 2001. Her numerous honors include the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for leadership (twice), top 50 Women in Tech (twice), NASA Achievement Award for her work on the Galileo and Voyager spacecraft, a Fed 100 award, Woman of the Decade from the Women’s Economic Forum, NASA Award for the Chilean Miner Rescue, and three Webbys from The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, among others.
Holm joined the Claremont Graduate University Board of Trustees in 2019.