Vendia | Connecting pets and their humans: How Best Friends Animal Society uses data sharing to connect pets to their human families, faster

Connecting pets and their humans: How Best Friends Animal Society uses data sharing to connect pets to their human families, faster

Connecting Pets & their Humans: How BFAS uses data sharing to reconnect pets to their families - YouTube

Connecting Pets & their Humans: How BFAS uses data sharing to reconnect pets to their families

Guest: Angela Embree, retired CIO of Best Friends Animal Society

Angela Embree talks with host Tim Zonca about data sharing across animal care providers and shelters. They explore the complex challenges of sharing data across thousands of organizations, and how better data sharing can drastically reduce euthanasia and connect pets to their humans faster.

Show Notes

Transcript

Tim Zonca 0:05 Greetings from the team at Vendia. And welcome to Circles of Trust, a podcast for leaders across all industries committed to speeding up innovation at scale. I’m your host, Tim Zonca. We’re about to dive into a conversation with Angela Embree, the former CIO of Best Friends Animal Society.

Angela Emree 0:35 Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Tim Zonca 0:37 So tell us a little bit about your background, including what brought you to Best Friends Animal Society when you first joined. And then, just a little bit more broadly, I’d love to hear about your connection to animals.

Angela Emree 0:56 I have been a technologist for a very long time and was getting frustrated with the position I had, which was in higher education. And I was ready to move on to the next level. I was working in technology; I was fostering, adopting, donating for animals to nonprofits. So, you know, it was my personal passion. One day, a former colleague of mine emailed me and said, “I have the perfect job for you.” And it was the Best Friends CIO position. I put in my application and got a message back that they had an offer out to somebody. Within two weeks, they contacted me again and put me through the interviewing process. I was offered the job, and the rest is history.

Tim Zonca 2:59 Oh. Okay, that’s interesting, yeah.

Angela Emree 3:05 I knew it was gonna be a lot of building, and I love building. So it was just like it was made for me.

Tim Zonca 3:11 That’s great. Do you have pets now?

Angela Emree 3:15 I do. I have four rescue dogs. We have three Standard Poodles and a Great Pyrenees mix.

Tim Zonca 3:50 Oh, cool!

Angela Emree 3:52 People think you can’t find purebred dogs in rescue or shelters. But two of them came from rescue, and the other was actually a Best Friend’s dog.

Tim Zonca 4:37 So tell me a little bit about when you were at Best Friends Animal Society. What were the top organizational priorities, especially when you went into what was a brand new role?

Angela Emree 4:51 When I got there, it was a very immature technology team, especially from a capabilities perspective. I built a list of things that we needed to build. The number one thing was data.

Tim Zonca 5:51 What kind of data was important to Best Friends Animal Society at that point in time? How was it being collected?

Angela Emree 6:15 There wasn’t much data being collected. Best Friends has a huge goal to bring the nation "no kill" by the year 2025. The data that was important was about animals in shelters, their outcomes, and whether they were being adopted or transferred.

Tim Zonca 8:40 Are there any other organization types that Best Friends Animal Society works with?

Angela Emree 8:51 They work with anyone associated with animal welfare, including veterinary clinics.

Tim Zonca 9:50 How was the data from thousands of organizations consumed and normalized?

Angela Emree 9:50 It was done through spreadsheets and needed a lot of manual entry and compilation.

Tim Zonca 10:34 Tell us about your vision around better data collection and sharing.

Angela Emree 11:07 We could do this much better as an industry. To interconnect data systems could solve many problems, including helping owners find lost pets.

Angela Emree 20:14 The ultimate solution we came up with was to build a blockchain network defined with pet-centric data to avoid privacy issues.

Angela Emree 21:52 Best Friends did an amazing job of communicating that they weren’t out to vilify anyone. They embed people in shelters to help improve their capabilities.

Angela Emree 23:52 I would say the thing I am most proud of is our efforts in improving animal welfare through data sharing and innovation.

Angela Emree 26:00 The magic wand would be to get them the funding they need to invest in technology while saving lives.