South Guilford News

What started as a six-month temporary job working with automated water-meter readers has blossomed into a fulfilling career for Roberto Caballero, the City’s first chief data officer. The path to his position has been hardly conventional, which is about right for this affable husband and home-schooling father of four who also performs and teaches music on the side.

Caballero has spent most of his life in Greensboro but was born in Colombia, his father’s native land. With a mother from Mississippi, Caballero quipped, “It’s a good mix, but when you say you’re from the south, you really have to specify regions and dialects and countries!”

The family settled in Greensboro when Caballero was three and he went through the Spanish Immersion Magnet Program at Jones Elementary, attended Kiser Middle School, and graduated from Grimsley High School. Along the way, he took such a liking to music he chose to major in performance (specifically trombone) when he enrolled at UNC Greensboro. He got married in 2008 and put his education on hold in search of meaningful employment in support of his new family.

Caballero experienced a tumultuous job market before landing a 1,000-hour roster position servicing the City’s new automated water meter readers in 2009. The position was extended and ultimately led to a full-time, customer-service job in the Water Resources Department two years later. While it wasn’t making music, it paid the bills.

When Caballero’s father-in-law (Steve Drew) took over as the Water Resources Department director, Caballero moved over to the Information Technology Department, which needed help in the rollout division of the customer service team. While he lacked a formal computing education, Caballero’s personal experience with computers and his natural problem-solving skills proved useful.

“I’ve grown up being very much self-taught in computing,” he said. “Most of my expertise is through either training courses or is self-taught. It's a mix of things.”

As Caballero approached each new opportunity with the City, he reflected on a principle learned while working for a labor-intensive, carpet-cleaning business as a teenager. “When we come in to take down a room, all the chairs are on the ground,” he explained. “Everything goes up, and everything goes back down the way you found it, better than you found it. That was the mantra. I very much carried that into every job interview: I'm gonna leave it better than I found it.”

The drive to improve service combined with Caballero’s innate perfectionist tendencies and curiosity led the City to create the chief data officer position for him in 2020. He had a lead role in helping the IT Department identify and implement a new customer service application (FreshService) and a new platform for the City’s open-data portal (ESRI). When department leaders wanted to develop these systems further, Caballero was the natural choice to do so.

In addition to administering FreshService and ESRI, Caballero works with City departments on projects that collect and process different data points. These projects illustrate aspects of a department’s function to give residents and leadership a picture or story of what’s happening in a given area. He likens this information to descriptions of characters in a story. Without a description, the author’s intent is unclear and readers must make their own interpretations.

“Data provides those details that fill in the blanks and show the current status of your goals,” Caballero said. “This helps define (or redefine) or point current goals into new goals. In a lot of departments, before you present the data, they don’t really know where they’re at.”

With timely and accurate information, department leaders are best suited to enhance or adjust policies or services for greater efficiency and impact. Caballero also notes residents are entitled to review data collected and generated by the City, so the City must be organized as it makes the information accessible and coherent.

Caballero works two days a week in the office and three days at home where he and his wife homeschool their four children, all under 12. While he appreciates the hybrid arrangement, he acknowledges there are challenges.

“It is a little bit different atmosphere because you're living in both environments,” he said. “There's a switch that has to happen and the switch is not as easy to flip on when you're not going in every single day. It's like I'm in work mode all the time.”

When not in work mode, Caballero enjoys performing benefit concerts with the Highland Rock Orchestra and giving piano and voice lessons two nights a week at the Highland Music Academy. He plays guitar, piano, violin, trumpet, and trombone and ultimately earned his performance degree from UNCG in 2017.

Caballero started playing instruments in elementary school and says music is “part of his DNA” that will be part of his life regardless of his profession. He also notes a connection between music and his day job.

“The way that I see music in terms of theory and the way I teach it is very technical,” Caballero said. “There's definitely a need to maintain that technical persona in either field. One has to do with SQL tables and things related to data governance and City business. The other has to do with chords and the 12-tone system.”

“Music is something I'm passionate about, which is why I'm grateful I get to continue doing it as a side gig,” Caballero said. 

Original source can be found here.