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New Orleans Business Alliance CEO Rod Miller's fledgling organization is responsible for generating economic development on a $2 million budget, three quarters of which comes from the city.
One of NOBA's overarching purposes is to serve as a liaison between City Hall and the business community, a relationship that historically has not been close.
One of Miller's first objectives is to hire research-focused staff to amass what he calls "deep" data to help attract new businesses and retain the ones already here.
When you say "deep," can you explain what you mean?
Sector by sector, how many people do we have employed? What are the skill sets of those people? Where is the education coming from? Are they mostly folks who have been educated at the fine institutions we have locally versus folks that have come from outside the market? What percentage of this population is not from New Orleans and what does that mean in terms of business growth? What sorts of investments and external markets are we seeing by New Orleans-based companies and why are they choosing to invest in other markets?
Is there a challenge in convincing the business community...