Here we go. Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. We'd like to thank you for joining the latest installment of the monthly Data Diversity webinar series, Advanced Analytics with William McKnight. Sponsored today by Looker. Today William will be discussing showing ROI for your analytic project. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to a large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them by the Q&A section. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions by Twitter using hashtag ADV Analytics. And if you'd like to chat with us with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. To open the Q&A panel or the chat panel, you will find those icons in the bottom middle of your screen for those features. And as always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of this session, and any additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now, let me turn it over to Joel from Looker for a brief word from our sponsor, Joel. Hello and welcome. Great. Hey, thanks, Shannon. And I am going to show you just some quick slides that are going to lead us into what William is going to talk about around ROI. So give me just a moment here. And we'll get that up and going for you. I thought it would be really interesting to talk a little bit about a background around ROI before we get started. Share a little bit of information about Looker as well. Shannon mentioned Twitter. I'm at Joel McKelvie on Twitter if you're interested. Feel free to get there, although I won't be able to respond until after I'm done showing you this stuff. But feel free to hit me there and use the hashtag as well. Great. So just to talk a little bit about ROI, there's a reason why we do analytics. And there's a reason why we access data. And that is because companies that use data well fundamentally do better. Insights driven businesses, according to Forrester. And these are businesses that use data to find new information, to drive better decisions, to improve operations and efficiency. They just do better. They do better at scale. They grow faster. They they transform more easily and really relevant for 2020 and 2021, where we've been disrupted throughout so much of the business community, they're much more likely to succeed during disruption. So it's really key that we use data well. And as a result, we're seeing that business leaders are rebalancing their portfolio to invest more in data. So that's good for us that are those of us who are data teams. But business intelligence, data analytics, and using data is a huge place where investment is going going forward. And that is why it's so important that we understand the ROI and what William's going to share in just a little bit. As we invest, we have to make really solid use solid cases for the money that we spend. But I think that what we can find pretty quickly is that it is money well spent. So so certainly I'm looking forward to William's session. I'm sure you are as well. So what is Looker and how does it fit in this universe? So Looker is a business intelligence and data analytics tool that leverages the power of your database to deliver data to the people who need it when and where it's needed. And we certainly do BI. One of our customers, Sun Run is a classic example that's using us for self-service analytics to do things like they're a solar company. So it's for solar installs, they track it, they track their sales data. They have dashboards and reports that they send around the company and they really use Looker for comprehensive business intelligence and metrics management. But it turns out in the world of modern analytics that traditional BI reporting and dashboarding is just part of it. And certainly Sun Run knows that they've been doing a bunch of other things, but there are more ways to get more out of data. And I think that this is really important for us as data specialists to think about is integrating data, integrating insights right into where people are using data or need data. A good example here is Stripe, the financial company. Their reps have data from Looker embedded right in their Salesforce instance because really they're working in Salesforce these teams and they need it right at their fingertips. So the insights are integrated right into where these teams work. And Looker can do that as well to embed those insights right where they're needed. Further, there's a lot of workflows that could be enhanced by data, whether they're physical workflows on a manufacturing floor, whether they're virtual workflows with organizations like Salesloft, they're looking to reduce churn and automate mail campaigns and do some automation with third-party tools to make sure that data is used and consumed very, very efficiently. And so again, embedding or integrating data right into workflows is a key part of analytics today. That's something that Looker offers as well. And then the last one, which you may not be considering, but which is very important, is this idea of customizing data applications. So a lot of online applications, a lot of mobile applications really use and expose data to their users, whether it's gaming, exposing, let's say scores or leaderboards information, fitness applications, health applications, retail applications, portals for hospitality websites. These all have a lot of data on the back end. If you've ever ordered something from a retailer, you want to go look at previous orders or see how much you've spent, that's all data. And integrating that into applications can be painful because it takes a lot of work to connect to the back end data and to model the data appropriately and expose it. And so custom applications, we have a retailer that's maintaining inventory using a custom application and doing a lot of supply chain management through it. Those types of tools are also being built and are very important for data teams and can also be built on top of Looker. And Looker actually provides a robust API, powerful access to data in your database or multiple databases that gives you a lot of control over the data and lets you deliver these types of what we call data experiences. Yes, the traditional BI and analytics, but integrating insights, data driven workflows and custom data focused applications right to the people who need it, where the data can be used and can make a difference to your business and drive the ROI that William's going to talk about going forward. So why Looker is different is not just that we can fuel all those data experiences, but at its core we have a fundamentally different approach to how we make data accessible to users. We have an in database architecture which leverages the power of the database to run the queries and we can connect to multiple databases as necessary. The average Looker customers connecting to three or more databases with some with many more databases simultaneously through Looker. But we drive that in database query engine to perform the query that takes place, so we can take advantage of the power and flexibility of modern databases with their in database architecture. We have a robust semantic modeling layer which lets you model once and use many times across multiple data experiences so that you can leverage analytic experience and data knowledge very, very aggressively in a do not repeat yourself manner in a way that is get enabled and shareable and collaborative in that semantic modeling layer. So when we can drive data experiences through that semantic modeling layer as well. And then an API first extensibility. What we do, we can do via APIs. So if you've got a third party tool you're trying to automate, you're trying to connect us to another tool to develop your dashboard, whatever it is that you want to do, we can take that modeled powerful in database architecture, the data that's associated with it and deliver it as necessary wherein when you want to use it. And we have a multi-cloud approach which means whether your data is in Google Cloud or Amazon or Microsoft Azure or in all three or there and on-prem, we can connect to it. So you can form multiple database connections from Looker and access data in the cloud of your choice. We recommend that you put Looker in the cloud hosted in the cloud that is closest to the bulk of your data, so that makes a lot of sense to reduce latency and all the rest. But we really let Looker follow where you are doing data, where your choice is rather than forcing you into our ecosystem. So we're multi-cloud from the ground up and we are happy to host you in Google Cloud or in Amazon or in Microsoft Azure at this time. So I'm very excited to work with you on your multi-cloud strategy. So with that to kind of round out our part here because I know that I'm between you and William and he's got the interesting stuff going on, right? I think the key here for driving a good ROI is to make sure that people can make smarter use of data.  What's really compelling is that we have found that when you enable experiences outside of BI, so that people can use data outside of BI, more than half of users end up using data in these different types of experiences. So that really frees up the data to have the biggest ROI possible. And of course we're intercompatible with most of the big cloud players and supports more than 65 now different database connections if you're interested from different vendors of databases. So don't take my word for it. Feel free to go out to looker.com slash demo and get a demo yourself. So it would be really, if you're interested, I suggest you just go and take a look and judge for yourself whether or not you think that we can help you drive a lot of ROI. So with that, thank you for listening.  Joel, thank you so much for kicking us off and thanks to Looker for sponsoring and help making these webinars happen. Really appreciate it as always. And if you have questions for Joel, feel free to submit the questions in the Q&A section in your screen. You can find that icon in the bottom middle of your screen for that icon. And now let me introduce to you our speaker for the series, William McKnight. William has buys many of the world's best known organizations. His strategies form the information management plan for leading companies in numerous industries. He is a prolific author and popular keynote speaker and trainer. He has performed dozens of benchmarks on leading database, data lake, streaming and data integration products. And with that, I would give the floor to William to get his presentation started. Hello and welcome. Hello. Thank you, Shannon. And thank you, Joel. It's always great to have one of our go-to products aboard here at Advanced Analytics. I trust that I am sharing the right screen, if not interrupt me, but we have a big topic today. As a matter of fact, I think this is one of the most important topics that I've ever talked about here at Advanced Analytics because no matter what else you do, no matter if you have the great architecture, you have the great tools, you know, you're doing the great execution of your projects and so on. It does come down to good old ROI many times. So we might sit here as analytic professionals and look at each other and say, well, isn't it evident that we need to do this? Isn't everybody doing it? This is the way of the future. And we're when we're in line with that thinking, I'm in line with that thinking. But if you've been in this industry long enough, you're going to run into the time when you're going to have to show ROI for your analytic project. And in my experience, it's been frequent. And it's been more often than not. As a matter of fact, we bake it right into our project methodology. And I suggest you do the same as well. So I'm going to help educate you a little bit on that process so that you can do that. And you can show ROI for your analytic project. So this is a jam-packed hour. Hopefully you don't mind. It's going to be a bit of a fire hose, but it's a big topic. And that's just how the topic falls. So I want you to be able to navigate your analytic project justification.  And yes, we should be doing this. And look at the great things that we're doing and we've got users that are happy and all that good stuff. It's not enough for some level. And those pesky people in the C level, they ask for things like ROI. Can you believe it? And sometimes we resent them for it. But we should not do that. It's a perfectly legitimate question. It should be asked more, frankly. And we should be better at our answers. So I'm going to help you become better. Distinguish between tangible and intangible. Too often, we analytic professionals love those intangible benefits. But it's not good enough for ROI. We want to be able to present an itemized ROI because let's face it, we're not sousayers here about exactly what's going to happen in the future. So let's present some different options as to what may happen. Articulate the value of an information program. So I'm going to hammer on this program versus project business here to begin with, because you all, the hundreds of you here have come to this session with that many ideas about what ROI is. And so I'm going to help you understand at least what some other people might think about and adapt that methodology. So I've been running a consulting practice now for over 25 years. So you can believe that I have gone through the justification of big projects many, many times over. And frequently, I come aboard when there's a lot of early days, when there's a lot of skepticism and very vague ideas as to what may or may not be able to happen in the organization and so on and try to take that all the way through. Now, you might be saying, well, we're already doing an analytic project, William, we don't have to justify it, we're already doing it. Okay, that's fine. The day may come. And maybe the day is here today for you, where you're asked to state what the ROI is in order to get a future budget or maybe in order to get a promotion or some such thing like that. So this is actually a quite important topic for all of us. And I do find that in those days, like 2020 and still here today, 2021, when things are tighter out there, it's asked for more. Okay, so I'm going to try to help you wear both hats here. I know we have to, we have to do the right thing. And we have to provide this ROI, but we can't just slam an ROI in there on the business that's going to go away tomorrow because we failed with our architecture hat. So I am very well aware that we must wear both hats at the same time. Are you prepared to wear both hats at the same time? You must be, somebody must be, that's going to helm up this justification. Well, quote here, I've dragged around for quite a while here. And it's just about the importance of the firm's measurement system. All right, let's acknowledge the strategic. First of all, before we jump into the calculations and the details, I get that things are strategic. I love to work on strategic projects. I love it when the client says, hey, we've got unlimited money. And let's do things that may or may not work and maybe break into some new markets and so on. But we're not all Amazon. We're not all Google. We're not all in those places. But the strategic is a place for learning and innovation. I get that. There is the unknown upside where we kids can't even begin to predict what a new project may, where it may go in the market. And it's the intuitive thinking employed by the highly paid professionals, the highest paid person's opinions in the room. And so sometimes we just go that way without doing ROI calculation and just burn the bridges and just go for it. Okay, I get all that. And that does happen. But more often than not, a analytic professional such as the people that come to this type of webinar are usually under at least a little bit of pressure to provide some ROI. Now, what's important here to begin with is to divide our work up into workloads. Yeah, we're all familiar with the term workloads. But we have to divide and conquer when it comes to ROI. You're not asked to do the ROI for the entire organization. If you work at PepsiCo, nobody's asking you, what's the ROI of PepsiCo? No, it's for a project. And we have to put bounds around that project. I'm not going to belabor this point, but I am going to call it out as something very important in doing this because you have to match returns with investment. It's not fair to gobble up all the returns for things that are not included in the investment side of ROI. And I have worked with many a very wise CFO or somebody in the CFO office that will point this out right away. And you start to lose credibility when you do, shall we say, sideways, things like that. So let's be sure we come in straight. Let's be sure that we are impenetrable in terms of what we're doing. Now, ROI is useful for many things, but it is important to me for building out a roadmap for a client because it's simple. What's easy to do? Okay, that's important. What are prerequisites for other things? That's obviously pretty important to get in the right sequence. And then what's the ROI? Because I want to hit on some things that are going to produce the most ROI. Don't we all? Shouldn't we all be wanting to produce the highest ROI we possibly can for the organization? I think so. As a matter of fact, if we're not working on that project and nobody else is working on that project that's going to produce the biggest ROI, then we ought to drop the project that we're working on and go work on that project that is going to produce the biggest ROI. Okay, let's talk about ordered benefits. And this is what makes it difficult to do ROI. Benefits can be direct or indirect. And since we're not exactly building, let's pick on a artifact, a data warehouse, we're not exactly building a data warehouse that we're selling subscriptions to usually. That's a very rare scenario. And if that is your scenario, you got it easy for ROI. How many subscriptions are you going to sell to the data warehouse? And what's the cost of building? Okay, that's easy, but we don't do easy things. We do things that have second order, third order, fourth order, et cetera, benefits. And so we have to trace the chain of benefits all the way back to the point at which somebody is selling something. PepsiCo is selling more Pepsi. The department store is selling more socks. The insurance company is selling more insurance. Okay, that's how we need to be thinking if we're going to do ROI. As a matter of fact, when I go to a new client, I like to start asking people, so where's the ROI from this project coming from? And I asked maybe 10 people in the project and I'll get so many different responses. And it's kind of that's kind of a symptom of no wonder that we're not all on the same page rowing that boat in cadence. All right, so why don't you ask yourself and your teammates, how are we producing ROI here with this project that we're working on? Are we trying to sell more insurance? Okay, I was at Dunkin' Donuts. Are we trying to sell more coffee? Are we trying to sell more donuts? Are we trying to sell more out of each of the stores? And we're not so worried about the product mix. Are we trying to create a less costly supply chain, et cetera? Okay, let's get the right answer. Are we trying to start at, are we trying to improve income? Are we trying to reduce expenses? Because it all comes down to that when we're talking about ROI. Now historically, and this is when I get involved because we typically tend to think we're good across the board at this stuff until we start rolling up our sleeves and trying to do it, we find out it's really hard. This is hard stuff. But once you kind of get it down and you've done it a few times, it becomes like anything else, a little bit easier. We're good at the tasks and activities. We're okay at it. I'll say what are the activities that are required to build out an analytics platform? There are accelerators out there. There are experienced consultants out there. There are experienced people inside the organization out there. There are patterns that work within organizations. And we can kind of picture what the final outcome is for a lot of our activities. But what we're bad at is what are the returns? You know who's bad at returns? Everybody. We're bad in the builds on the build side of things and the business is kind of bad on the business side of things. And as a matter of fact, they try to duck and dodge the question just like we do. Just like we do because we just want the project to be justified. We don't want to deal with all this stuff. But I'm telling you, you may have to deal with it. You may be in that seat right now. And you may hate this stuff. I mean, personally, I like the architecture stuff better myself. I like the technology. I like making things happen. But this is part of the deal, I would say. Part of the deal for an analytic professional, at least anyone that wants to kind of make a real mark for themselves in this space. You got to know how to do this. We're bad at risk. We tend to not take it into consideration when we do our ROIs. We're bad at costs. We used to be good at costs. We used to be okay at it, I'd say. But now you think, oh, it's all cleaned up with the cloud, right? No, it's not. Because the cloud with all of its flexible spending options by usage and so on, those costs have tended to be higher than many shops think it's going to be. And the usage just tend to be higher. Well, I guess you hope that's a good thing, right? You hope the usage is translating somehow to ROI. But nonetheless, we're bad at costs. We're bad at timelines to, I don't think I need to belabor that. I think if you've been around this industry for a while, you know that a lot of timelines are missed, unfortunately. So that's historically what we're good at. We got to talk about the difference between a program and a project. Because again, we have different opinions of what it is that we're justifying. It's very important to hammer this home. All right, let's understand this. Only a project has straightforward ROI with a set of costs, say to build an analytics platform. Let's say you're putting in a new Synapse database with a looker on it. And you're bringing aboard a talent for the ETL. And you have your machine learning portfolio with you. You have your streaming. You're buying a data catalog for it, et cetera. Stuff I've covered on other sessions of advanced analytics, all right? So that's your costs. And how are you getting returns? And it's not easy, but you can kind of figure that out. But how about a program? Maybe you're thinking, well, you know what? I really don't know what the business is going to do with it. I'm justifying a program. I'm justifying a program approach. Now, when somebody tells me they're justifying a program approach of things or the right thing, the right way to do things, you know, I think about, well, you're trying to build a data warehouse instead of data marks, okay?  I totally get that.  I get that completely. Maybe the approach there is more of a TCO type approach. Like, if you do it this way, it's going to cost this much. If you do it this way, it's going to cost this much. And you'll have plus or minus these kinds of benefits if you do it this way. The goal of a program is to enable the component of the application as supports. It all comes back to applications or projects. I probably shouldn't have used them interchangeably here, but it all comes back to that. It all comes back to those things that are put in place within organizations that hopefully are driving hard at sales or expenses. So, what's being justified? Now that you are starting maybe, hopefully, to wrap into this idea of program versus project, are you trying to justify an information management or analytics program which will store data for several projects? A sample question there is, why use the data warehouse architecture versus independent data markets? That's a vastly different question from should we do targeted marketing. That's a vastly different question from how do we optimize the supply chain or how do we do fraud detection? When you are doing projects like the three I just mentioned and the 25 other ones that you're doing in your organization, when you're doing projects, the artifacts become just support for those projects. Now, we're builders of data warehouses. We're builders of data lakes. We're builders of data hubs and MDM and blah, blah, blah, right? That's mostly the audience to this webinar. We build this stuff, but we don't exactly use it. So, sometimes we don't know how the projects translate into the bottom line of the organization. However, that doesn't get us off the hook for doing ROI for the entire project because most of these projects today are technology, not only are they technology based, they're technology dominant. It's the technology that what those projects are all about. So, now get out your protractors. I trust you all have brought your protractors to the session and get out your scientific notation calculators, which I think I put in the pre-rex. Everybody needs to bring to this. I'm just kidding, of course, but there is some math involved here, right? Return minus investment over investment, that's your simple formula. ROI should always be supported with a time period because if you tell me I'm going to get 10% return on my money, I'm happy if that's one day. I'm not so happy if it's over 10 years, right? So, we have to put the time period on there as well. ROI should be presented with assumptions and risks and be itemized by however you want to break it down. However, it makes sense to you to break down that analytics project. That way, the decision makers have something to decide. Oh, yeah, let's do it this way. It looks like this way will produce the most ROI with the least risk, blah, blah, blah. That's the kind of response that we want to generate with doing ROI for justification. Add the possibilities, but don't oversell. Don't get crazy with this. If anybody says to me, well, we've done the ROI and we're going to get 10,000% return next year, I'm like, I shouldn't say like, I'm saying that is way too much. You are overselling. You may believe it and we can always shoot for the moon here, but let's be realistic so that we are perceived as realistic. Again, we use ROI for predicting and measuring. Now, if you're doing a program, again, back to project versus program, can't get away from that. If you're doing a program, program helps because there's less impact on operational systems. We're not pulling data all the time from a source system to stored here, stored there, stored over there. We're not taxing out that operational system, which might impact its running, number one, but it also might be very costly to an organization. One way of doing things, there is merit to that. Tools, competence, there is merit to that. Consolidating expense streams, there is merit to that. Getting this notion of enterprise subject areas. Master of data management is kind of pure about this, right? We're building the one customer master for the entire organization. Well, if you think about it, the program approach is really about that, no matter what artifact you're using. As a matter of fact, let me jump to the next slide. If you're doing a data warehouse, you could justify that with ROI or TCO. Think about it. Some people, some shops will confuse, I guess, the data warehouse versus the applications. Let me put it this way. No organization needs a data warehouse. What they need are the things that the data warehouse enables for that organization. That's how we got to think about it. The target of marketing, the supply chain management, the customer management, the fraud detection, the IoT operation, et cetera. What are you justifying? The idea of doing this as a data warehouse? If you're doing an analytic data store for one project, to me, that's not a data warehouse. That's not shared. That gets wrapped into the justification for the project. If you're saying, well, let me look at the roadmap here for the organization, there's 10 projects coming up. They're all going to need this, that, and the other data. They all could go roll their own and be incongruent. It could cost, let's say, a million dollars each one to do it. It also could highly risk out those projects, or we could do it. We could build a data warehouse, build it once, use it many times. That's a TCO question. In larger organizations, a lot of times the builders do not have tremendous visibility into the usage. They just know that so-and-so needs, so-and-so data. Project B and C and D, they all need the customer data or the sales data, et cetera, and they seize upon that opportunity to build it once, use it many times. You can see down the list here what some of the preferred approaches might be. Again, you'll get the slides later, so you can come back to it. I'm going to go through some of these for you quickly, but it's not that difficult, really. Once you break it down into cash flow, I'm going to say that again. Once you break it down into cash flow, now I see the hairs are standing up on end out there, and people are saying, William, we shouldn't have to break this down into cash flow. It's just so good for the organization. It should be evident. Again, I'm back to that conversation that I had with you earlier. Yeah, I agree. I get that, but at some level, that doesn't fly. At some level, the CFO is not going to dig into analytics .com or dataversity.net and do all that reading and figure out, oh, yeah, it looks like this is a good strategic thing to do. They're going to ask the question about ROI. These are the four basic variations on the ROI theme. Now, my suggestion is let's not be Nostradamus about it here. Let's present at least three possible scenarios with how we present this. If I'm asked to justify a project, I'm going to say, yeah, this is the best case. A little goes wrong, and I'm not trying to, by the way, I'm not trying to pump the ball here and say, well, I won't, I'll just leave it all be up to you. I suppose you can look at this and say you're risk sharing here, and I accept that. I am, but I don't have all the answers. I do want to bring the sponsor, if it's a sponsor. I want to bring the sponsor into the decision-making process, and I want to show that I'm not here saying I can precisely predict exactly what's going to happen here. There is a worst case, and usually my worst case is that I show our negative ROI. We just, you know, it didn't work, and we just wasted $3 million, $4 million, you know, that could happen, and here's why it could happen. And by the way, that process of going through the why it could happen helps you, because then you start to take care of that, and make sure it doesn't happen, so that you get a little closer to the best case. All right, now let's talk about tangible versus intangible metrics, because again, I find a lot of billed professionals think about the intangible, but at some level that doesn't work. Again, if you're going to break it down to cash flow, you need something tangible. Now, there's a fine line between tangible and intangible. Some people like to say, well, it's hard and fast. No, it's not hard and fast, it's what do you choose to measure? What do you choose to measure? Do you choose to measure the fact that I actually had this scenario about 15 years ago, that we were going to build a data warehouse because it was going to save on paper costs, because everybody was printing out their report, and they couldn't just go to a screen and get the report. Kind of ridiculous in my opinion, kind of petty, but that is how that went down and that helped. It wasn't the only factor in justifying it, but it helped. And it turns out, it wasn't as petty as I thought, but still, but still, they chose to measure that. I would usually not choose to measure something like that, but you could say that that's intangible. If you choose not to measure it, it's tangible. If you choose to measure it. So these are some hard, tangible returns, increases in sales. Yeah, we like that. Now, you can only take back into ROI in my opinion. You can only take back into ROI. You have to take out the cost of sales, right? Because if we sell a t-shirt for 20 bucks at our store, that doesn't mean that 20 bucks went straight to the bottom line. Efficiencies in processes, reduction in inventory carrying costs, automated processing, reduction in returns and fraud. Interesting. Reduction in returns, reduction in fraud. That's a big one. Well, fraud has a cost. And if we can reduce the probability of that cost, that is a straight to the bottom line savings, procurement savings, savings in inventory holding costs, operational savings. Now, intangible. And we tend to throw these terms around. Speed to solutions. Don't we all want that? Well, how much faster and what does that mean? Clean data. Okay, you have clean data. But what's the downside of not having clean data? Why do we need that? The single version of the truth. Same thing with all of this. Faster response to customers. You might say, well, that's important for strategic purposes. Oh, yeah, it is. I don't doubt it. But can we translate that to dollars? Et cetera. So now we've got our cash flow. And I just summed it up there, but it's a lot of work, as I'll say again. Let's get into some examples. Now, what do you need to know? You need to know the discount rate because money has a differing value over the course of time. If you're going to give me a dollar today, I'm much happier than if you're going to give me that dollar a year from now, because it's going to be worthless. That's just the way of things. And so the difference there, if I were to take, let's say, if you were to say, well, I'll give you a dollar in, I don't know, pick a number, 15 cents a year from now, would I take that versus the dollar today? I'm like, maybe yes. So that would mean if I'm like on the fence, I shouldn't say like, sorry, if I'm on the fence, 15% is my discount rate. Organizations have a discount rate. CFO offices are usually well tuned into what that is. And you look really nice by asking about that and making that into your calculations.  So I usually cap my ROI analysis at three years. Time blocks, minimum a quarter. Some of you want to break this down to month by month ROI. I just think that's too much. I think that's a really ridiculous level of granularity that's very hard. And so I bounce it up to a quarter or a half a year. I prefer a half a year. Half a year, three years duration, you're golden. Now here's one doing it at a full year. And this is a basic example here. Cost savings. You're going to save this company $140,000. How are you going to do it? I don't know. Let's say it's fraud detection. Let's say it's, yeah, let's just leave it at that. It's fraud detection. So you're going to save on this fraud. Year one, no savings at all. Hmm, why? Well, you're building it. It takes you a year. Again, these are just round numbers to kind of weight into this, right? Year two, you save $60,000. Year three, you save $80,000. So you're breaking even at the end of year three. That's actually an ROI measurement right there. When do we break even? The sooner the better, obviously. And you see your financial return there, and your investment. Your investment in getting to this cost savings was $120,000 in hardware, and that's going to break down to 100,000 in year one, 10,000 in year two, 10,000 in year three, et cetera. So it's a 10% caring cost or a maintenance fee, if you will, on that. So you do the math, return my investment over investment. Year one, you're in the whole 100%. You can't get worse than that. And the year two, it still doesn't look good. Year three, it's looking good. If you can go out that far, and again, I say you don't go out any further than this. If you can't justify itself in three years, heck, if it can't justify itself in one year, projects shouldn't be done in most cases when it's an ROI related project. Now, you may debate that, but find out what the culture is like in your organization. What is the aptitude? What am I trying to say? What is the aptitude for long ROIs? I find increasingly, it's shorter and shorter. It's down to about one year now in general. So now we did the ROI, so I just bring that over to this one. See what the cash flow is? You see the cumulative cash flow. You're actually 20,000 in the green after that third year. Your internal rate of return, it's simple math. I won't go through it. It's an Excel function. Net present value, again, an Excel function. Not hard once you get the cash flow. All this is easy once you get the cash flow. Now, you set it up to where there's three probabilities. And I say probability one, again, best case to worst case. Probability one, 40%, that's going to happen. Probability two, 30, and then 30 for probability three. That adds up to 100. It's not a coincidence. They need to add up to 100. So after year three, and I won't go through all this, but after year three, the probability of ROI one is 16.67%, as I already showed you. ROI two, well, that looks like it's the worst case, doesn't it? We're still at negative 33% after three years. But three, we're knocking it out of the park. That's a massive 116% return. Now, most organizations would go for that. But most organizations would not go for the negative 33. Now, if they're really looking at ROI, they would not go for that. There's probably other projects or maybe there's a reshaping, reformulating of this project that could happen that would make it more of a positive ROI. And this is where you get to sharpen the pencil and make that project work for the organization. So to use a worksheet, you can build this yourself. It's easy. You just got to get the discount rate, know the revenue generation, or cost reduction, and the work cost reduction by year for the next three years. Now, that's in years. You might do half years. You might do quarters. Again, figure out what the culture is. And I am giving you ideas as to what to do if you can't get the answers. So I say do it by half year. I say do it out three years. Discount rate. You can maybe Google on that and kind of figure something out if you can't get that number. And then it'll get shaped as time goes on in this calculation because it's not a one and done. It's never really been a one and done because once they see that you're serious, you're actually doing this. You were asked for ROI for that analytics project. You actually didn't. You know how many people would just turn away and say, well, they don't want to do it. This company, they want that ROI stuff. I'll never do that. So they don't want this analytics project. Most people will turn away. I won't turn away from that. And you shouldn't turn away from that because that's a very normal thing to do.  Know the cost implement. And that's five words, but that's a mouthful. And it comes down to hardware or cloud software. People costs. I've done extensive research on this recently published. Some extensive research on this. Azure versus GCP versus AWS versus some other stack. And just what the costs were to carry all that technology over the course of years. Estimate the costs and benefits for three scenarios. I'm just reviewing what I just showed you. Estimate the probability of each scenario. And I just mentioned where your costs come from. Now I have some other examples, but I'm not going to belabor them. But I'll show you, this is fraud reduction. I actually kind of labeled the other one fraud reduction too. That's okay. It's the idea that you are doing something generous to the bottom line of the organization one way or the other. You're saving on expenses like fraud is an expense. Or you are increasing revenue. Okay. So year one, again, I show zero. We are not, we are just investing in year one. It takes a year to get to the first outcome of this. Now, I don't like that. I don't think it should take that long. I'm not going to demand that the ROI be very high in year one, but it should be positive. It should be positive. Here it's negative 100%. That's terrible. We need to do better than that out there today. Anyway, you see the breakdown here, the financial return over the course of three years is 1.25 million to the bottom line. That sounds good. Let's get into the expenses. The expenses add up here, 105,000 for hardware, 144,000 for software, consulting, 50,000. That might be a little askew. Consulting tends to be equal parts to hardware and software in these kinds of projects, but whatever, the investment is 299,000. That's not much investment for 1.25 million return. And that shows up as a 90% return on investment after year two and a 318% return on investment after year three. You get the gist of this? See what I'm doing? All right. Here's another example, and I won't belabor this either, but this is healthcare. Some of you are in healthcare. You're saving on claim. I did this project, not with these numbers exactly, but I did this project. So we're trying to both add revenue by adding customers and reduce costs at the same time with this project. That's okay. That's actually great. So on the revenue generating side, how did this project, now this project was to reroute claims to best of breed providers. So if you're having a C-section, you're having an ACL repair, etc., you go to U.S. a patient, go to the, quote, unquote, better physicians for such things. And that means better results. That means fewer claims down the road. And that's what I'm trying to capture in cost reduction here. We're saving on claims. What's the average cost of a claim? Well, 25,000. So do the math. Total impact of just saving on claims is going to be, in one year, year three, 4.5 million from this project. And we're going to, at the same time, attract customers. Customers like that they're going to better doctors for what they need to do. And that's something that we can certainly advertise if we're doing it. And we're adding, say, 30 customers in year three. Now, that doesn't sound like a big number, but we're talking about corporation, big corporations here. And the average customer premium, etc., the gross profit from the customer premium, again, it's not fair to take the whole premium to the bottom line, etc. And here we have a breakdown of that. And here are some other examples. Increase revenue per customer, increase customer acquisition, blah, blah, blah, reduced IT spend in supporting databases, more of a TCO thing. Reduce likelihood of regulatory fines. What is the probability that you're going to have a regulatory fine today if you just keep doing what you're doing? Versus, if you do project X, what will that drop it to? Well, what's the cost if we actually were to have a regulatory fine? Oh, it's about 20 million dollars or whatever. So is it worth it? Okay, that's how these things are thought of at some level. Abstracted ROI. Let's say it's hard to get to that ROI. We're not doing some of the things like I just showed you. Impossibly measurable at the individual level, must measure at the large group level. Stuff like, well, what if we improve the customer satisfaction? Or my mind's drawing a blank, but what's the net promoter score? Okay, what if we improve that? Let's say, for example, for our customers, if we target that improving the net promoter score, how does that affect our bottom line? Well, customers are happier. They stay longer. They tell their friends, etc., etc. So what does that mean? Sometimes you have to do it that way. You can't think, well, what's the impact of this going to be on Joe Smith? And how much do we make off of him, by the way? Okay, now let's go on to Mary Jones. Okay, not possible. Not possible. So at the large group impact level, you're doing things like that. All right. Now TCO, those of you in the program category of things doing TCO, should I use data, warehouse or data Mars? Maybe these are the questions that you are trying to address right now. And I say go the TCO route for these questions. Now you might be diverted over to ROI, and that's okay too, but this is where I'm starting. Is the cloud worth it? Should I use a big data solution or a relational database? Hmm. I think TCO is part of that today. Is master data management worth it? Why don't we just let everybody roll their own customer, roll their own product, not bother with a risky master data management project? Well, you can do the math on that. And that is a TCO example because we're not including taking it all the way to we're going to sell more stocks or we're going to reduce X expenses in our supply chain. Okay. Maybe these are some of the questions that you are asking. And by the way, some of these are questions that I have addressed in full sessions of advanced analytics in the past and in the future because this is evolving, right? So generally the cloud is worth it, but you have to be able to do the math and show it, right? So a framework for that is important. I've just given you the framework that some people need in your organization. You might say, well, I don't know anybody like that. I don't know anybody that needs that. Well, maybe your boss does and maybe this is partly why projects are getting stalled out or you're not getting the credibility that you need within your department because you're not showing ROI, but the guy over there is showing ROI for his project, even though if you did yours, it would be more than his, but you're not doing it.  You can do cost analysis, tangible benefits analysis, cash flow analysis, do a probability distribution. Okay. Again, we're not soothsayers here, but we must have an idea of where these projects are going. Do an intangible benefits analysis. I know I said poo poo on the intangible benefits, but they're still important and they're a nice addition. So when I'm doing a project justification document or project, yeah, of course, I'm going to do exactly what I showed you here. I'm going to show the ROI and that's going to be like 30 pages of assumptions and so on, but then I'm going to throw in, hey, don't forget these are the intangible benefits. You get that single version of the truth, that warm and fuzzy clean data stuff. That might resonate with somebody and I'm not ignoring it, but really at some level, they don't care, but throw it on in there anyway. Just don't try to do ROI on it. Prioritization and planning decisions. So again, getting back to how we do projects in organizations. One of the things is what's the ROI on the project? Higher ROI should mean higher priority. So how do you know until you do it? All right. So in summary of the presentation, target the business deliverable of the project. Use a repeatable consistent process using governance for project justification. And by the way, I've given you a process here today. It may or may not fly exactly how it is. Within your organization. That's okay. That's okay. I flex this. I can't tell you how many times to make it work within organizations and you'll have to as well. ROI is an important component of justification, but I'm acknowledging it's not the only one. There's still that strategic out there which I talked about. Use the fact that a program drives to lower TCO. A data warehouse is better than going data Mars for that reason. Master data management is better. Et cetera. Isolate project benefits and costs. Remember my sheep? All right. I had put fences around the sheep so I could do some isolation. Make sure that you articulate very well what your isolation level is going to be. What your application really is. Put those fences around it. Make sure people understand these are the fences.  Because if you are doing that wrong, if people are thinking something different, that could drop a bomb on your whole ROI. If it's important, you can measure it and you can improve it. The project will almost always pay for itself. Yeah. If it's important, you can measure it and improve it. But if you can't do those things, and again, many organizations, people building this stuff, they walk around not even knowing. Are they trying to improve revenue or save on expenses? That's essential. Judgment is essential and I'm not trying to remove that at all. Not one iota. I'm trying to improve your abilities to have great judgment really here with advanced analytics, but especially today. Judgment is essential. I'm leaving that in the equation for anything and everything that you do. That is so important. That's why experience matters. That'll be the conclusion of this part. I saw that quite a few questions were coming in. I'm going to turn it back to Shannon to fire away Joel and I, those questions. Awesome. Thank you, William. Thank you, Joel, for these great presentations and I am just going to dive in here to get, as there's a lot of great questions coming in. How do you account for diminishing window of opportunity as your competitors also start advanced analytics programs? Well, that's outside the bounds of this now, isn't it? Because that's saying that there are reasons we want to do this project that don't have to do with ROI, that have to do with keeping up with the Joneses, if you will, but keeping up with the market, keeping up with the technology that's important. I say that's an intangible benefit that you still need to work on. You need to take that another level and say, well, if we wait, here's what the scenario is going to look like and here's going to be the bottom line ROI. But if we act now, here's what the ROI is going to be. Here are some opportunities that we can capitalize on immediately the sooner we do this. I had one client, they were a home video organization and we were doing master data management for their videos and they were able to, when there was a market opportunity, let's say for example, a famous actor, one in Emmy or I don't know what is it, an Oscar. One in Oscar, there's a mad rush to, well, there used to be, now it's all digital, but there was a mad rush to rent all the videos for that actor. And if they couldn't agree what the videos were for the actor, then they would miss that opportunity to a competitor or to nothing. And so they were able to measure the ROI of our activity by saying, well, we would get way more rentals immediately if we actually, as soon as we do this. And so let's do it now instead of three years down the road and get that opportunity. So I'd say it's really a matter of continuing to work on that equation. All right, Joel, anything you want to add? You're muted. I would say accounting for a competitor activity is always hard when you're doing financial modeling. It's non-trivial and it's very specific to your industry. I've seen it modeled as a standard discount rate over time where you say, this will have a lower impact in differentiation. But what's interesting is that ROI is not a modeling of your impact compared to a competitor. It's really a modeling of the impact to your businesses. And so competition will be included in your estimates of how much sales are increased or how more efficient you become. And it'll be included there natively. You probably don't need to compare it externally unless that's how you're justifying it to your CFO or whomever at which point it probably benefits you to not include it in the calculation but call it out as a sort of a separate part of your presentation or your pitch. Love it. So how do you justify an analytical solution that will increase sales or decrease costs? Well, exactly how we showed you with ROI. That's great. I mean, that's if your analytical solution is increasing sales, let's say, well, how much sales are being increased? A million dollars in a year, whatever. What's the cost of those sales? 500,000? Okay, you're increasing by 500,000. How much does it cost to build the analytics solution? 300,000. Okay, there's a 200,000 to the bottom line. That's a positive, I think, 66% return. Whatever like that. That is actually a very healthy return. Of course, I just made up the numbers. But if you're doing something great for the organization, I kind of left this out of presentation. Let me just slip it in here. If you're doing something great for the organization, you know you are, get the thing justified. However, you need to. And I'm giving you tools to do that with, but it's incumbent upon you to justify projects that are great for the organization, not to hold those projects close to the best.  Yeah, you know, William, I think that's a really great point. I read the question a little bit differently, which is how can you say that better access to data or better analytics will actually cause an increase in sales or decrease costs? And that's really going to be specific to your business, right? But I think that we can all sort of intuit that, for example, if I know that an analytic solution will be able to suggest a subsequent purchase to someone who buys something online, that it can probably drive some business. And it might make sense if you're really stuck trying to say, well, will something like that drive business is to do it maybe manually at first and see whether or not you actually do impact business or do some lightweight experimentation before you go for a full project. But I think that we're all, as data teams, we're pretty sure that we can use data to drive the business forward. And if we are, then I believe that there is actual data you can find that will show the justification for whatever your ROI is, increase sales or decrease costs, the higher efficiency, whatever it might be. Well, thank you both. But I'm afraid that does bring us to the top of the hour. So many great questions here still. I'll get these questions over to everybody. So we can get you guys some additional answers there as well. And just to answer the most commonly asked questions, just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email by end of Monday for this presentation with links to the slides and links to the recording. Thank you both so much for these great presentations. Thanks for our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. I just love it as always. You guys are just amazing. And thanks to Looker for sponsoring today and for helping to make these webinars happen. Well, thank you, everybody. I hope you all have a great day. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you.


As an economic consultant, we provide answers in economics and antitrust matters. When our client has been damn far or wants to merge with another company, we will evaluate the situation and provide answers when really matters. One of the great aspects of being a consultant is that we are in contact with multiple industries, multiple clients and we get to learn a lot about a lot of industries, which is great on a personal perspective and we get to work with real data, which is great as well. TSC provides you with an economic toolbox. It allows you to have an open mind and to apply different methodologies and different theories to real life issues. I was surprised that as soon as I joined Alix Partners, I was able to apply everything that I had learned in my Masters and I have applied every single thing that I applied in any subject that I was doing. TSC is really famous in the economic consultancy world so it was a great asset to have it on my CV to be recruited at Alix Partners and I think it is for any consultancy really. Just having TSC in your CV will lend you an interview and you will listen to in your job because they know, people know that you've been taught by the best professor in antitrust and competition fields. I think my piece of advice, we trust yourself. Trust your studies, go with them, follow them and you will realise when you start your job in day one that you are actually well prepared, that you know your stuff and everything will be fine. When we defend clients, we sometimes defend clients that have been suffered from companies that were too powerful that were abusing their power and we try to defend the little guys. Sometimes it feels like a David versus Goliath because their companies suffer and they lose their business because bigger companies that have access to more resources are able to patch them out and that's not good. It's not good for innovation and it's not good for the economics. So we are defending the common gun by defending our clients sometimes. I think the common good is that they are grateful in that in our duty to be truthful and realistic in our analysis.


At this time, Mayor Benjamin, now do you all want to go straight into that particular item? Do you want to take up the public hearing and first reading for all zoning and planning matters starting with item 14? Would you like to go straight to item 17? Item 20? 20. Okay. So they're 20. With that, Mayor Benjamin, Ms. Hampton is on the line and if you could open up the discussion for the public hearing on that particular item. We're going to open up the public hearing on the Unified Development Ordinance, the adoption of a new Sea of Columbia zoning map. I think as it may have been stated already, this is official public hearing, but we do want to make it clear as I think it's been articulated by several of our council members that this will be a very deliberative process. It has been a long time coming. Staff has been working very closely with the community and they're very engaged and transparent process, but obviously the challenges presented are limited accessibility because of COVID-19. We want to make sure we spend some quality time answering questions and being available to the public for all the questions that might come about recognizing the very intimate nature of property ownership and what it means to each and every one of us. So we're going to be very intentional about ensuring that this dialogue is ongoing for a period of time, but we're opening this public hearing. So please, Madam City Manager, Ms. Hampton, please. Good evening, everyone. Greetings. I'm Krista Hampton. I'm the Director of Planning and Development Services and I, along with our city's zoning administrator, Rachel Bailey, are pleased to be here today to present the new zoning map for your consideration. As the Mayor mentioned, it will only be a public hearing and a vote will not be taken. My first order of business, so I can make sure it gets into record, is to say thank you. Thank you to Council, to the City Manager, Theresa Wilson, to my direct boss, Assistant City Manager, Missy Gentry, to our Planning Commission members over these past five years and the citizens and stakeholders who have kept up with the project and provided valuable input. The project is better because of all of you. We had a terrific consulting team in Clarion and Associates and Planning Next who helped achieve the vision laid out by our community. And finally, I want to especially thank our amazing staff. Although some have moved on before the completion of the project, our staff worked tirelessly through many drafts of the code and subsequently mapping over 46,000 parcels doing some of the most arduous and grueling work I have experienced in my years at the city. If you subscribe to what Teddy Roosevelt stated and that nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and difficulty, then this ordinance and map are surely worth having. We usually keep our presentations on zoning matters brief, however, because of the significance and to help answer questions received by staff and council, we will take a bit more time on this matter tonight to provide needed information. So let's first review the agenda for the presentation. During this presentation, we will provide context and background to the project to include a brief history. We will move into an overview of the uniform development ordinance. So while the matter before council tonight is consideration of the zoning map to implement the recently adopted UDO, for those who may be new to the project, we want to provide information on this new code. The intention is to obtain input and allow for additional questions over the coming weeks. We will then review the new zoning districts that are illustrated on the maps. Next, we will review how to navigate the maps to see what the current and proposed zoning is for a given parcel. We will go over a proposed schedule for council consideration to complete the project. And finally, we will allow council to conduct the hearing and be available to answer questions. So how to comment tonight? In addition to viewing the meeting at the city's website, the public may listen to audio and participate in the meeting via telephone by calling<PHONE_NUMBER>. When you're prompted, you can enter the meeting code, which this evening is 9907. At that point, you need to press star one to listen. Stay on the line until public input portion of the hearing is announced. That will help our clerk immensely. Just stay on the line. If you are not able to stay until the end, however, you can press star two and leave a voice message. Comment time is limited to three minutes. So when the public input portion is announced, you can do the aforementioned star two. Or if you want to speak live, you can press star three to be placed in the speaker queue. And staff will unmute callers during this time. Callers are limited to three minutes. And please, if you are participating by phone, make sure you turn off any of the other audio on your devices before you speak to avoid feedback. So let's review some context and background by answering some questions. So what is the uniform development ordinance that this map is implementing? The unified development ordinance, finally known as the UDO is the combination of the zoning and the land development ordinance for the city of Columbia. Zoning is the law that determines how land or property can be used in the city. It regulates the uses and the size and location of buildings and a host of other development related items like parking, landscaping and signage. Zoning does not require you to take an action. It sets the table for projects and development, but it's up to the property owner to do the work to make that happen. So what is the role of the zoning map in this ordinance? To enact zoning regulations in the text, the UDO establishes varying districts, residential, commercial, industrial, that each have different sets of uses and standards. These districts are established by ordinance and the official zoning map identifies the location of these districts, thereby specifying the land use and development requirements. This is what is under consideration by city council. So why do we need this rewrite? I can tell you it's not because we just woke up one day to decide we needed to change the ordinance. A new ordinance has been needed for at least 10 years, if not more. The current ordinance is over 40 years, which in and of itself does not make it obsolete for those of us who are over 40 years would attest. However, over time, piecemeal changes have created a code that is contradictory, difficult to understand, and does not necessarily reflect the development patterns desired. The UDO resolves these issues and is intended to simplify and streamline development review, providing an easy to understand set of rules while creating a more modern code. And so how did we get to this point? We've been working to get to this point for quite some time. The first step in this project actually was in 2014 when we rewrote the land use plan. We called it Plan Columbia. It provided the needed policy guidance for this new ordinance. Directly after adoption of that in 2015, we began the process to rewrite the code. We had numerous public meetings at various stages of the project. The first was a community workshop to obtain input on what the goals of the code should be. It was followed by meetings on the assessment of the code and drafts of sections as they became available. The timeline looks like this. And the graphic illustrates the beginning of the process with Plan Columbia through drafting the modules. The drafting of the code was completed in 2019 with the adoption of the text in August of that year. Soon after we began to apply the new districts to the over 46,000 parcels located in the city. We completed this task in early 2020. We were excited about getting started with some public meetings and published those maps in March of 2020, which was of course impacted by the pandemic. So we've established the context in the background. Next, we're going to take some time to provide an overview of the ordinance that was adopted and this map would implement. The key themes and goals during the Plan Columbia process and the ordinance process, we received input on what the code should address. So we're going to take some time to get into these key goals here. To create a user friendly code is the primary goal of this project. This has been accomplished by a complete reorganization of the document, better use of flow charts, tables, clarifying language. It's more logically oriented, organized, easier to understand. It's streamlined procedures. And it provides flexibility in the appropriate context. Because ordinances are intended to implement the comprehensive plan. This also works to implement Plan Columbia, which has become a part of the Columbia compass that everybody's aware of and aligning these regulations. It's intended to modernize regulations to strongly encourage context sensitive infill. That was most of the city is developed and most of our commercial development is infill and we need to have regulations that support and encourage that in appropriate locations. Finally, support green development practices, clarifying standards for alternative energy use and enhancing urban agriculture standards. So right here you see the nine articles of the ordinance. And this is the structure of the ordinance with a new reorganized code. It's logical. It makes information easier to find. We are going to go briefly through each of these sections to describe the purpose and the impact. The first general provisions article is really the housekeeping section of the ordinance. It sets out the authority. An important part of the section is the transitional provisions. These establish the rules for how developments recently approved or in the process of being approved during the code will be handled. So that's predictable. The administration and the geeky part of me just loves this section. This section creates simple, but a very impactful change in this code. It's intended to consolidate and streamline all procedures for development review into one article. It's intended to improve the efficiency and transparency of the review processes by consolidating and standardizing generally applicable procedures. It's streamlines existing review procedures and add more flexible procedures where appropriate. It's organized into five sections. So now a reader can go to one place to see who is involved in the process. I'm going to turn it over to Rachel for a section here. Rachel. All right. So next we have article three, which is our zoning districts. This article establishes the basic standards for the various base. Base plan unit development and overlay zoning districts. The base districts include residential activity and corridor. Institutional on campus. And industrial districts consistent with the street. And industrial districts consistent with the structure of development types established in plan Columbia. In addition, the lineup carries forward several current zoning districts. And also modifies and adds new districts to better align the structure to policy direction that's set out in plan Columbia. And to make the current regulations more user friendly and efficient. And the next slide. The format of the district regulations is greatly enhanced with the use of 2D and 3D graphics. These photos are there to show example development types. As well as tables to concisely summarize the standards. So while it is longer, it should be easier to understand, which we thought was a pretty valuable trade off. The new zoning districts consist of nine residential districts. Nine mixed use districts. Five institutional and campus districts. Three industrial and one PD. Now PD was formerly called PUD. Residential districts have largely stayed the same. And we'll discuss that a little bit more on the next slide. A notable change in the non residential districts. Is that many more are mixed use. And the use in dimensional standards are based on the context of the development. Instead of a one size fits all approach. The context, our neighborhood. Community and regional. It's also important to note that our historic and design district overlays. Are remaining the same. They just have that name change. There are new institutional use districts to reflect the heavy presence of these uses in Columbia. And we also are retaining our industrial districts. We would like to take a moment to review the residents. The residential districts. We would like to take a moment to review the residential districts specifically since we've received quite a few questions about these in particular. So we have the TC, which is the transitional conservation district. The LLR, which is a large lot reserve district. We have our residential single family districts, which are the large medium and small lot districts. RD, which is two family. As well as the RD MV, which is the middle village districts. RD to family district. We also have our RM. Mixed districts. So the RM one and the RM two. And all but a handful of kids throughout the city, the classification of parcels and residential districts has stayed the same. If a parcel was RS. It is now RSF. And if it was RG is now RM or RD. The same with our RD. Those have remained RD. In addition, the standards and uses permitted remain largely the same. An important thing that we do want to note. Is that RM. Those mixed residential districts. That does not mean mixed use. It means that as in the existing. RG or general residential districts that we have now. If there's adequate lot area. Setbacks. Lot coverage. And other factors. Then different types of residential uses. Could be permitted. The principal change in the district regulations. Across the board. Is that front set backs have been reduced anywhere from five to 10 feet. And the permitted lot coverage has increased. We should note that a few of these changes from RS to RM, such as parcels on Azure around rear. Those were not intended to be changed and are being changed back. That is a frequent question we've got. So we just wanted to make that clear. And the chart on the next slide will illustrate the regulations for our current and proposed districts. For a comparison. So as you can see from this chart. The regulations have generally stayed the same. Where changes have been made. It was because many of the existing structures in our neighborhoods did not conform to them. So we just wanted to make that clear. So we just wanted to make that clear. So we just wanted to make that clear. So as you can see on this table, it has the current district versus the proposed. And it goes through lot area. Lot width. Density. Depth. Lot coverage. And our setbacks and height regulations. And just to note again, we do carry forward all of our historic design and community character districts. They remain in the same location. So we just wanted to make that clear. So we just wanted to make that clear. The next article is article four. So this contains our use regulations. So it consolidates our principal accessory and temporary uses. It includes use tables. That identify what uses are allowed. In what zoning districts. It also includes standards that apply generally across the board. As well as specific standards for specific uses. This section has been streamlined considerably. So it consolidates the 305 uses we currently have from the obsolete SIC code. Into 123. Uses with specific definitions at the end of the code. Article five. That is our development standards. So this article consolidates all the development standards related to the physical layout of new development. So there's also, it differs from our land development subdivision standards, which will come up in article six, but in article five, it's divided into 12 sections for parking, landscaping, tree protection, open space, et cetera. An article six contains those subdivision standards. Article seven through nine. So article seven. That is our nonconformity section. It greatly improves on the current code and that it consolidates all provisions related to handling nonconforming uses and structures into one area. There are new provisions for dealing with nonconforming site features, including street parking, landscaping and signs. It builds on the partial compliance provisions in 17, four, 11 of our current ordinance that pertain to expansions and renovations of existing buildings. Article eight consolidates all enforcement provisions for the zoning code. And article nine contains the standards rendering interpretations, rules of measurement and definitions used in the UDO. This section greatly enhances the ease of using this code. That consolidates each of these tools for administering and interpreting in one location. Terms are clearly defined and consistent with usage elsewhere in the regulations and they're written in plain English. So that concludes the overview of the UDO. We'll now go over how to navigate the map of the current and proposed districts. The link to the draft map is on the project webpage, which can be located at www.weplannedogether.org slash Columbia review. At this site, you can also review the project background and view the text of the UDO. We are available to make appointments to meet with those who need access to a paper copy of the map. You can call the zoning office during normal business hours at<PHONE_NUMBER> to make an appointment. Once at the site, you can either pan to explore the city as a whole, or you can type a specific address in the upper left search bar. On the right side, you'll see the layer list. You can choose to see the current or proposed zoning by selecting the zoning district in the layers in the upper right. Selecting a parcel will provide the zoning district information. An important note, if you're searching for a specific parcel and it does not have a classification that comes up, that means that the parcel is either split zoned or it has been recently annexed and hasn't had a district assigned yet. Please contact the zoning office for information. From here, you can click on the district name to be taken to an information sheet on the new district as shown on the next page. A new window will open showing you the information on the district. This is the page exactly from the text of the ordinance, so it gives you the purpose of the new district, as well as intensity and dimensional standards. Our overlay districts, as we mentioned before, a lot remain in the same area, but we do have three new overlays. Those boundaries can be viewed on the zoning page at Columbia SC.net slash zoning. That's our airport height overlay, 80-30 height overlay, as well as our setback overlay. We're going to go to an online map, but I think in the interest of time we'll have that available to review once council has some questions on the map. That was a great way of reviewing it. I'll go ahead and take those steps to determine the basic regulations. If you have a house, first go and you find that zoning district in the viewer. Within that text of the document that's also located, you can download that or view it online at that same location. Navigate to those pages in the district page in article three, or you can just pull it up as Rachel showed you to show the regulations for that specific district. Then to see the use tables that are permitted within that district, you go to the uniform development ordinance and navigate to article four, and it will show you it's a table that shows you the uses that are permitted. We'll have a P, a C means it's conditional, so there will be a P. A C means it's conditional, so there are conditions for you to have to have that use, and S means it's a special exception from the Board of Zoning Appeals, and if it's blank, it means it's not permitted. In addition, for commercial developments, we'll review the development standards in article five that Rachel mentioned. I was remiss, you saw all of those, the fabulous map with the links and to the charts and to the district pages. We could not have done that without our amazing GIS team. They worked really hard and were very solution-oriented, helping us to get that viewer out there, and we are greatly appreciative for all of their work. So we've reviewed the background, the history, we went over the uniform ordinance and the districts in particular. So here is our proposed schedule, and Council, this is a proposed schedule, to find a way to forward to get this project to completion while allowing for additional input and meetings. So we'd have this public hearing this evening. We will have available, and I'll bring that to your attention on the next slide, one-on-one appointments. So we would schedule those over the next week. If we need more, we'll schedule more. Through February 26, we'd have this period for additional input stakeholder meetings with the neighborhoods or any other groups. We need to amend the effective date of the ordinance and the code. It's currently set for March 31st, so obviously we have to defer that. We would put that back to August 30th. We would bring City Council the reading of the new map to you for first reading on April 6th. We would have the changes to the map. And then we would have the changes to the map. Simultaneously, we'll be bringing the changes that are identified through this process. To planning commission. Or at May, on their May 3rd meeting. That would then have a City Council second reading of the entire map on June 6th. However, it would not be effective on that date. July 20th, we would bring you the changes to the map, thereby amending that map prior to the effective date. We would have the second reading on the revisions on August 3rd. And then everything would become effective on August 30th. We need that lag time in there to allow us time to reconfigure our software. Work on some of our forms and the like. So as I mentioned, we have opportunities for one on one meetings. These are either by phone or teleconference. Or by email. If you want to schedule those, you can go to our website at Columbia SC. Gov slash zoning. Or the, we plan together website. Or you can email us at zoning map at Columbia SC. Those are the preferred ones or during the regular business hours. Give us call. And we will set up an appointment for you. And mayor and council. And then we will have a meeting. So just as a reminder. You may, if you want to, at this point in time, either press star two to leave a voice mail if you need to go. Or spread press star three to be placed in the speaker queue. And staff will unmute the callers as they come up. Note there is a short pause as the call is admitted. And callers are limited to three minutes. So you may turn off any audio on other devices before you speak. So that we can avoid feedback. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hampton. And thank you very much. The entire team for the comprehensive presentation, even more so the comprehensive process that we've gone through. The importance of obviously recognizing where we are now. And everyone's throwing down a bit. So everyone can fully understand and have the ability to fully engage with the process is so important. So thank you for the proposed next steps and an updated schedule. As well. Madam clerk, who do we have up first? And would you reset the rules for folks, please? Yes, sir. As Chris has stated, callers will have three minutes to speak. If you haven't already done so, please press star three to join the speaker queue. At this time, we have two individuals who are in the queue. The first individual, I do not have a name, but your phone number ends in 2970. We will proceed to add the caller into the meeting there. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. My first call. I'll have a question for Rick and then back at the start of all this covered stuff. You said that you believe that cover restrictions were unconstitutional. Why do you support them now? And I apologize. We need for all callers to state their name for the record. Michael Bailey. Oh, Michael Bailey. Michael Bailey. I'll just in the interest of preserving the focus of the public hearing before us. If Mr. Bailey, if in the, at the end of the agenda, if Mr. Rick, let's take up that question he can, I think, I think he may dialogue with. Wait, is everyone going to talk about this again? Now we're talking, what we're talking about the proposed regulation before us. So I wouldn't have the opportunity to ask about it and otherwise I would ask. No, you would actually. I'm asking everyone, obviously we want to make sure that we remain focused on the, on the issue before us. That is a, that is a legitimate public policy question. Mr. Bailey, not the issue before us right now. When am I going to be able to ask it? The, at the end of the agenda, when we have opportunity for public input, and we're going to, and obviously if we're able to get through the agenda, that should be very soon. So I would encourage you just to maybe be a little, just a little bit more patient if possible. I would really appreciate that. Okay. I'll wait. I'll ask him again then. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Bailey. We have next on clerk. Okay. Right now we have a Mr. Haines, Paul or Paul Haines, who will add the speaker to the meeting now. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, council dedicated city staff, thanks for hearing me out today. I have a rather nuanced request slash question. I am a property owner in the victory gardens neighborhood. And I noticed that the designation proposed for this neighborhood is out of a RSF one large lot. And I had spoken to hope a little over a year ago possibly changing the designation for the neighborhood to allow for more development. This neighborhood is not seeing any new construction in over 27 years. And that's due to the high cost of construction combined with low property values in the area. I personally have been working diligently to help turn the neighborhood around. There is no functioning neighborhood association that I can tell I've spoken with the former secretary myself and several others in the neighborhood would like the council and zoning administrators to consider allowing for a less restrictive zoning policy so that more new lots could be created in the neighborhood and hopefully spur development and bring positive changes. All right. Thank you. Chris. Can someone help answer that? Yes, we've actually been in contact. So we will I think we can have that conversation offline with him. We missed divine has assisted us in making this connection. So we will continue those conversations. Super. Super. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for your leadership and helping get things organized in the neighborhood. Strong neighborhoods associations make a strong neighborhood and strong neighborhoods make a strong city. So thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you for taking the time to listen. Yes, sir. Madam third. Okay. Benjamin at this time we have a voicemail message from Miss Diane Wiley that I would like to play into the record. Thank you, ma'am. My name is Diane Wiley. My telephone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. I'm still waiting to talk to somebody. We need to talk in these meetings because this is concerning us. You all work for us. Not we work for y'all and we don't, we don't have the time to sit and listen to the meetings all through because we got our day to day duties to do. But anyway, when this is over with, then we can do what we need to do as far as our communities. In our communities 29203 and four, they need some uplifts. These are people that's on fixed incomes. You need to be trying to do things like that. And then zoning map. We need to be looking at the zoning map to see what's going on because it would stop certain things coming in our neighborhood. You know, these people don't have nowhere else to go. And another thing, a lot of houses, every time you turn around somebody want to buy a house, why you want to buy it now? Because we are in this city and it's not fair. So we need to wait until this COVID is over with to get some things done, stop doing things under the table because we need to talk to each other in face to face. All y'all on city council know what I'm going through. Been out of my house going on six years. We can't get anything done. So I'm going to pass the word on to everybody. I know about what's going on. Thank you very much. Thank you. I know we'll have an opportunity to dial Miss Wiley. Thank you so much. Madam clerk. Anyone else in the queue. No, sir. We don't have anyone else in the queue at this time, but I do have a message that was left on the web portal that I would like to read into the record. Please would you. Yes, sir. The comment says myself and some other residents and property owners in victory gardens would like for city officials to consider changing the zoning designation for the neighborhood to allow for small allowed lot sizes to spur new construction. No new homes have been built in the neighborhood in 27 years despite available lot. This is due to the high cost of construction and low property values. A zoning designation of RSF three would conform to many already existing lots and being keeping with the character of the neighborhood. There is no functioning neighborhood association, but I am willing to petition residents and owners to gauge overall opinion. I personally own three, seven properties in the area that currently has an RSF one designation accounting for one tenth of the total properties affected. Please consider making this change to allow us to revitalize this neighborhood, returning it to a safe, vibrant place to live. And I do not have a name further on that again was from Mr. Paul Haynes. I apologize. I didn't pick up on that. Sure. Sure. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you very much. And I know that you said Ms. Divine already closed the loop there on victory gardens. And again, I want to, if there's, if there are no other, no one else who's popped into the queue. Madam clerk, let's go ahead and continue moving. I do want to highlight again for interested parties who are paying attention that there's not only the extended calendar that Ms. Hampton referenced earlier, but there'll be constant communication online accessibility snail mail phone accessibility. There'll be a number of different ways that our staff will aggressively communicate with folks. Everyone will have an opportunity to have their, their say. Obviously, I'm sure it's already anticipated Ms. Wilson, but let's make sure that this presentation, the calendar, the ability for folks to easily understand how to, how to contact folks is on the front page of the city website. And we continue to push that information out. Any questions from council? Now from stare. Don't. All right. Let's um, Mr. Mayor. Sorry. I see. I see. Um, just, um, uh, miss Hampton, can you just repeat again? I just want to make sure it's clear because I think there's been some confusion that there can't be any changes that based on your proposed schedule, um, look like if there are input that requires changes that, um, that would go to the planning commission and still keep us within the schedule, but things, things can be changed. Is that correct? Yes, ma'am. Um, we have already identified a few changes that need to be made. Um, those were mentioned earlier in addition to a couple others, you know, with 46,000 parcels, you're going to have a few that you identify. So this, those along with others, um, that we will actually bring back as part of that process to a work session to council to make sure those are aligned with you all's goals and not so that we don't have to, to do this. You know, more than twice. So we will gather those up over these next days. Um, bring those back to you at a work session type meeting. And then bring those changes back. Um, on those dates that were, um, listed, um, with July. So we are going to make changes and we will make additional changes as a result of the feedback. Um, and direction from council. Thank you. Daniel. Uh, yes. I just wanted to, um, ask Christa what the best way is to connect. Uh, I know that you got several phone calls and you, you were very helpful with the wood Creek folks and other folks who had questions. Do you want to continue to use that platform? Um, that we did with, uh, wood Creek and in some of the other neighborhoods where people were able to log on and kind of have a point person asked questions. Um, if necessary. And I know you made some corrections. Um, and clarified some things for the Heathwood neighborhood and others, but just wanted to, uh, see if that, if that was your preferred way to handle some of these questions that may still pop up. Certainly if, if it's kind of neighborhood wide, if it's a more general like that, it's best if we can get as many people together as possible to go over those questions. Once we get into the weeds and maybe property specific questions. Um, that's where these one-on-ones are useful as well. So we'll, we'll be flexible. Um, and how we get this information out. But, um, for time sake, it's best if we can get a, um, in a, in a, in a call or on a, um, teleconference. Um, and then if people have things that they need to dig into, we can set up a subsequent meeting. Yes, sir. Mr. McDowell. Yeah. I'm, I'm sort of in agreement with Daniel. Um, you did out, you did a presentation for the lion street community and well accepted. Um, and, uh, all questions were answered. So if we could do something similar to that, as we push forward, that would be, uh, tremendously helpful. This is going to be a, this is going to be a master class and constant communication. Y'all. So I think every, every question you get, whether a big or small, any neighborhood from a group or from an individual, let's make sure we have a, a seem amount of transportation. I think we're going to be able to do that. Um, so as we move on to the neighborhood from a group or from an individual, let's make sure we have a seem amount of trans, uh, uh, of a transmitting those messages to our staff. And they are ready willing and able to try and address those concerns. Uh, and, and, and, uh, as Mr. Pines question and indicated. Uh, if changes need to be made, we have the ability and authority to do so. from so many different sources right now. So let's just endeavor to be fully transparent as we make this very important step forward, which indeed is what it is. So if there are no more questions Kristen and the team, then I'm trying to make sure we're understanding we do call this public hearing to an end, right? Or do we leave it open? I'm trying to remember. We've got some more things in the public hearing. Okay, okay, please. I'm sorry. Let's keep on going. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Duvall. Keep on going. Starting off with 14. So are you all done with this item, Mayor? Yeah, we are. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Thank you and I want to say thank you to our wonderful sign language interpreters. And Krista was thanking all of you and us, but we certainly have to thank her and her team. This has been quite the undertaking. I've done a great job. All right. Good deal. Let's go on. Let's go on back.  Yes, sir. All right. And Krista, are you prepared to switch gears back to these items? Hope y'all can see my screen. Yes, ma'am. All right. So we have an annexation with future land use map and zoning map amendments for a .478 portion at 680. It's Kandy Lane. It's a request to annex, assign a land use classification of UEMR and assign a zoning of C2 with the flood protective area. All right. Is anyone here to speak in favor of or against this? Ma'am, clerk? No, sir. Not at this time. We would ask that if someone would like to speak in regard to this matter that they press our three to join the speaker. All right. No, sir. All right. Thank you, ma'am. Movement by Mr. McDowell. Is there a second? Okay. Any discussion? Sitting down to move the previous question. Clerk Calderon. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Reubenan. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. DeVy. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. An annexation with future land use map and zoning map amendment at .509 acres on the south side of Candy Lane. A request to annex and assign the land use classification of UEMR and transitional sensitive lands and assign a zoning of neighborhood commercial that C2 with the flood plain overlay. Again, this is a small donut hole. All right. Super. Madam clerk, we have anyone who signed up to speak on this matter? No, sir. All right. Go move, Mr. Mayor. I'm moving by Mr. McDowell. Is there a second? Second. I'm moving probably second. Any discussion? Sitting down to move the previous question. Clerk Calderon. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Reubenan. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. DeVy. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. Duvall would also like to be recorded as I. How about that, sir? Thank you. Good deal. All right. An annexation with a future land use map and zoning map amendment for 103 acres near Circle View Road and 21.9 acres on the west side of Circle View Road. It's a request to annex, assign the land use classification of UEMR and transitional sensitive lands TS with a zoning of RG2 general residential with a flood protective overlay location. Madam clerk, do we have anyone who signed up to speak in favor of or against this matter? Okay. All right. All right. Is there a motion? The move. All right. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Sitting down to move the previous question. Clerk Calderon. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Reubenan. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. DeVy. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. All right. Donut hole right near downtown annexation with future land use and zoning map amendments. Properties on east Broadway, Post Street, South Evans and South Assembly Street. It's a request to annex with a land use classification of AC2 and UCAC1 and UCMR3 scrabble. I just won. Assign zoning of light industrial that's M1 with a portion in the flood protective area and C2 with a portion in the flood protective area. This is a much better way of describing it via a map right here on South Assembly. Capital City ballpark is right across the street. That was pretty good, Krista. Is anyone who signed up to speak in favor of Oregon system? Madam Clerk. No, sir. Not at this time. All right. Is there a motion? We'll move. Second. Any discussion? Question, Mr. Mayor. Krista, can you come from all these properties are currently owned by the University of South Carolina? Correct. All right. Thank you. Certainly. All right. All right. Seeing no further discussion, we'll move the previous question on Kurt Karl Raul. Mr. Vernon. Yes. Mr. Rickman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vine. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Binschner. Hi. We have now is only a future land use map amendment. We recently had a request for a rezoning, which was withdrawn, but it showed that the land use at this location, which is performance parkway at the Midlands Tech campus, this is to modify it from industrial to employment campus, which will permit a great many more uses. Again, it's only land use. It's not zoning, but instead of having to do a two step process potentially in the future, this will facilitate quicker development. So this is to go from the industrial into the employment campus. Madam Kirk, is anyone signed to speak on this matter? Not there. All right. Thank you. There's a motion to approve. All right. Moved by Mr. McDowell. Seconded by Mr. Davis. Is there any discussion? And y'all feel free to, I can't put the map up. I can't see everyone's hand at the same time.  Seeing no discussion. With the previous question, the clerk call the roll. Mr. Vernon. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vines. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. This is a zoning map amendment or a rezoning for parcels on Oak and Henry streets. This is a request to rezone the parcels from general residential. That's RG1 and RG2 and C2. So it's got a melange here to C1. This is the property that the second Nazareth church has recently been working to improve. Great. All right. Is anyone who signed up to speak in favor of or against this matter? Madam clerk. Okay. So moved, Mr. Mayor. Moved by Mr. McDowell. Is there a second? Okay. Second. Mr. Rickerman. Is there any discussion from council? Seeing none, I'll move the previous question, the clerk call the roll. Mr. Vernon. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vines. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. And sir, that now concludes your zoning public hearing. All right. Thank you. Thank you.