STUDENT PROFILE
Ryan Swann:
A Story of Service Just days after Ryan Swann MC/MPA 2019 and his identical twin brother, Bryan MC/MPA 2019, accepted their diplomas in 1998 at Prince George’s County Largo High School in Maryland, the brothers enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and were en route to basic training in Parris Island, South Carolina. “I come from a large family of veterans and public servants,” says Ryan Swann, recipient of the Ash Center’s 2018–2019 Roy and Lila Ash Fellowship in Democracy, a scholarship that is awarded to a meritorious mid-career student with a proven dedication to democratic governance and public-sector innovation. “I really felt the need to serve.” The brothers planned to finish boot camp, head off to college at the University of Maryland, College Park, and return to the Corps for routine training obligations. In the fall of 2001, during their junior year, however, the attacks of September 11 changed everything. Their unit was activated and, together, they deployed to Iraq during what would have been their senior year at Maryland. “It was a test,” Ryan reflects. “It was a challenging time for my family.” Ryan served one tour in Iraq, and he and his brother returned home safely in early 2005. Of his time in the military, Ryan says, “[It] humbled me and gave me a sense of discipline and leadership and a challenge that I hadn’t experienced before.” Ryan then returned to College Park to finish his degree and, when he left a semester later with a newly minted bachelor’s degree, a Navy Unit Commendation, and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, his career of service would take him in new directions. A New Challenge In 2006, Ryan traded in his uniform for a suit and tie as a senior business intelligence lead at the US Department of the Treasury, working to set up the department’s data analytics capabilities. His task was to use data to improve the Treasury’s internal decision-making processes, a difficult undertaking in the nascent data analytics field. Barely two years into his new role, the 2008 financial crisis took hold. “We realized that [the Treasury] should have been doing more with the data that was being collected and stored,” remembers Ryan. “That was another humbling experience, but I learned a whole lot about the intersection between data and policy.” In 2014, Ryan left the Treasury to join the US General Services Administration’s Office of Government-wide Policy as the organization’s first director of data analytics. “This thing, data as an asset, was new,” says Ryan. Federal data, however, is as old as the republic itself. From handwritten census forms to spreadsheets and PDFs of reports and white papers—data lay siloed across the federal government in innumerable databases, hard drives, websites, and filing cabinets. Orchestrating the convergence of billions of data points, while necessarily breaking 16
Communiqué
Spring 2019
