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McKinney outlines citywide data program and demonstrates Snowflake AI tools
Summary
City staff showed a new data governance program and a live Snowflake Intelligence demo that pulled building-inspection results and linked to back-end records; officials said about 185 city data sources will migrate over a phased two-year rollout with key datasets prioritized this year.
Brandon Opiello, who led McKinney's data program update at the Feb. 17 work session, told the City Council the effort will centralize roughly 185 enterprise data sources and bring governance, security and analytic tools to city operations.
Opiello said the program rests on six pillars'strategy, governance, literacy, metrics, continuous improvement and implementation'and that a governance council and a leadership team are now in place. "Data is one of the most powerful assets," he said, arguing that better-managed data will enable faster, data-informed decisions across departments.
The presentation emphasized practical steps and timelines: Snowflake was launched for the city in October 2025, Opiello said, and the team will migrate the largest, highest-value systems first. He estimated the entire migration of the 185 sources could take about two years, with the largest datasets ingested within roughly a year; parallel work on dashboards and business use cases would begin this summer.
Opiello ran a live demonstration of Snowflake Intelligence using a small building-inspections dataset. The tool returned an immediate result: "You did 64,000 inspections last year," the interface displayed. He also asked the system to identify who inspected 401 East Virginia and to link to the related inspection in the city's InterGov permitting system; the demo opened the inspection record in InterGov during the presentation. Opiello said those capabilities could reduce the time staff now spend writing queries and navigating multiple systems.
Council members asked about security and vendor choice. Opiello said Snowflake offered the required security features for government use and noted other Texas agencies and large organizations using Snowflake, including Houston and state agencies. "We've got a solid product that is proven and that has the security protocols in place that can do what we need it to do," he told council.
Opiello outlined the immediate next steps: hiring a data architect and data engineer, ingesting high-value datasets first and deploying dashboards and business use cases through the summer, while continuing to refine governance and access controls. He said staff will monitor model outputs and correct bad answers through curator feedback (thumbs-up/thumbs-down) and additional training data.
The council expressed support for the program and for the data team's cross-departmental approach. Opiello said the program aims to improve efficiency for staff and, in time, provide appropriately curated public-facing data and conversational access for authorized users.
