In his 2010 Inaugural Address, Mayor Menino challenged his administration to “to transform our delivery of basic city services and usher in a wave of municipal innovation”. For the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT), that directive took an aggressive IT agenda to an even higher level.
Over the last two years, the City of Boston has effectively responded to our Mayor’s challenge to “to transform our delivery of basic city services and usher in a wave of municipal innovation”. This January, 2010 challenge opened the door for the City’s newly designated Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT) to accelerate an already aggressive IT roadmap. This year, DoIT was able to deliver an increasing number of enterprise systems to back-up key city departments while supporting creative, new solutions to better engage and assist the City’s business and residential constituents.
Boston’s “digital” investments continue to serve the City well. The City’s focus on engaging citizens continues to expand. The City’s award winning website has been enhanced and improved. On-line chat connecting our site to the Mayor’s 24 Hour Constituent Services team connects our delivery channels to provide increased accessibility and convenience to City residents. Version 3 of the City’s Citizens Connect mobile application was released this September – adding new features to an engagement channel that now makes up 15% of total City Service requests. Version 3 adds multiple language capability and texting services – both features intended to increase the reach of this channel to new groups across the city. The change in channel volume has allowed the Constituent Services team time/resource to proactively reach out to City residents as follow up their service requests. Overall, the focus on engaging our citizens in innovative ways has increased constituent satisfaction, improved the overall service deliver quality and decreased the cost of operation.
Evidence of these results and further engagement with the City’s constituents can also be seen in our newly released Boston About Results (BAR) interactive performance management tool. Here, constituents can easily view performance measures across all major city departments.
Building upon the success of our citizen engagement efforts, our September launch of the Boston Business Hub will provide similar channel capabilities to the City’s small and new business community. The Business Hub was built on a SaaS (Software as a Service)/cloud platform, offering some important operational efficiency across City departments. The platform brings together the key business-facing City functions – with an interactive front end that streamlines access to City subject matter resources and on-line business services. Coupled with an accelerated Enterprise License and Permitting initiative, these innovative solutions play a critical role in the Mayor’s Jobs Initiative.
This year also marks key milestones in critical enterprise systems initiatives. Managed by a now mature Project Management Office (PMO), the City is implementing an upgraded Financials System (PeopleSoft 9.1) with new e-procurement/strategic sourcing modules, Enterprise Asset Management (IBM Maximo), new Computer Aided Dispatch/Records Management (Intergraph/Denali) and a new Student Information System in the Boston Public Schools.
It is an exciting year in Boston. Our initial IT focus invested in infrastructure that allowed City functions to connect and collaborate. Our BoNet fiber optic network now connects 200 City locations. The City of Boston is now enterprise. Initiatives across Administrations and Finance, Public Safety, Operations and Education/Human Services are delivering benefits to departments and the constituencies they serve. DoIT’s cost effective, “on-time, on-budget” approach has let to confidence in our work and increases in IT funding.
