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Brandon Braner
All case studies

Government / Public Sector

Measuring Iowa's Executive Order 10 progress across every state agency

Iowa's Executive Order 10 tasked every state agency with cutting regulatory burden — but progress lived in thousands of Administrative Code PDFs. I built data pipelines and dashboards that turned the code into quarterly, agency-by-agency metrics, so key leaders could see exactly which agencies were reducing restrictive language and how consolidations moved the numbers.

Client
State of Iowa
Industry
Government / Public Sector
My role
Data Pipelines & Dashboards
Duration
3 months
Statewide
Every agency measured on one dashboard
4 views
State · agency · restricted term · quarter
Quarterly
Trend tracking across each year
Merger-aware
Trends stay comparable through consolidations

Situation

Iowa’s Executive Order 10 directed a top-to-bottom review of the state’s administrative rules, with agencies expected to reduce restrictive terms, total word counts, and overall regulatory burden. The source of truth — the Iowa Administrative Code — lives in PDFs spread across every agency of state government.

Leadership had a clear mandate but no instrument. There was no way to measure where each agency stood, how the code was trending quarter to quarter, or how a wave of agency consolidations was moving the numbers.

Approach

I built the measurement layer end to end: data pipelines first, dashboards on top.

Pipelines over PDFs. Data pipelines ingest the Iowa Administrative Code PDFs, extract and normalize the text, and run it through analysis algorithms that score the code on the metrics that matter under the order: restricted-term counts, total word counts, and other key regulatory measures.

Four ways to slice it. Dashboards give key leaders the statewide picture and let them drill down — by agency, by restricted term, and by quarter of each year — so a conversation can move from “how is the state doing?” to “how is this agency trending on this term?” in a click.

Consolidation-aware trends. Agencies merged during the initiative, which would normally break every historical comparison. The pipelines track those mergers so counts roll up to the right successor agency and trend lines stay comparable across reorganizations instead of resetting with each one.

Outcome

The dashboard became the shared scoreboard for the initiative:

  • Key leaders can see at a glance which agencies are performing against the order — and which need attention.
  • Quarterly views show how restricted terms and total word counts are trending, from the whole state down to a single agency.
  • The effect of agency mergers on word counts is visible and attributable over time, rather than a source of confusion in the numbers.

Executive Order 10 set the target. The pipelines and dashboards made progress against it legible — for every agency, every term, every quarter.

Stack & tools

Document ingestion pipelines Text analytics Data modeling Interactive dashboards Cloud infrastructure