Making Cities Run Better with Smart Data Management

“The ultimate goal for cities is to use data to become more efficient and effective and to improve the quality of life for residents. We at City Innovate are excited that again this year we have a high number of ‘data’ challenges from our cities seeking a response from innovators.” — Kamran Saddique

Often the initiatives that make the most impact on the greatest number of people aren’t the newsworthy stories that you hear about every day.

Every government depends on data to run efficiently and serve people effectively. If it’s managed well, it largely goes unnoticed, but where there’s a gap people start to receive inadequate services, and governments struggle to allocate resources.

The backbone of a city is, of course, the smart network that underpins it. The applications of a smart network are endless.

Solving data challenges is one of the top priorities for City Innovate’s government partners in this year’s STIR cohort. Across the country, governments have identified challenges that are open to a wide range of technology solutions to make the governments themselves run better, and to make city resources more equitably accessible.
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Here are the data challenges that are seeking solutions from startups today:

City Trail and Open Space Utilization The City of Carlsbad is looking for a system to accurately collect data regarding the utilization of beaches, parks, facilities, open space and trails.

Electronic Review and Routing of City Council Items The City of Carlsbad is seeking a digital system for the review and routing of city council items to provide a logical workflow, multiple reviewer capabilities, item status visibility and electronic signatures.

Boards and Commission Management and Civic Engagement To improve standardization and civic engagement, the City of Carlsbad is seeking a transparent platform solution to manage appointments, agendas and communications for their Boards and Commissions.

Construction and Maintenance Inspection The City of Carlsbad is seeking a simple solution to enable city staff to more effectively track the inspection of 1400 assets annually.

Provide Dashboards of Public Service Requests Made by Residents to Various Departments To provide city leadership and residents with real-time dashboards on city service requests, the City of Phoenix is seeking a mechanism to export the CRM data from their Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to a SQL Server database in Azure.

Enable Project and Portfolio Dashboard Reporting The City of Phoenix is seeking a partner to assess the effectiveness and suitability of their existing Microsoft Project Web App (PWA) solution to deliver a flexible project and portfolio dashboard to enable planning, forecasting and smart decision making for citywide technology investments and projects.

Implement Formalized Data Governance and Data Management The City of Phoenix is seeking to solve poor data management, siloed data quality and multiple sources of the truth to provide data analytics and business intelligence services for multiple city departments.

Evaluate and Assess Various Tools to Provide Dashboards for Application Portfolio Management

To provide real-time dashboards of application availability and performance, the City of Phoenix is seeking to evaluate and provide best practices for the integration of various databases being used by the City including SolarWinds Orion, RemedyForce, Configuration Management Database (CMDB), BMC Discovery and Microsoft SCCM.

Getting to Know You: Building Relationships with City Businesses The City of Takoma Park’s Housing and Community Development Department seeks a solution to collect information about local business and increase engagement with City staff.

Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) Data Management System The Cuyuga County Office of Early Childhood is seeking an automated program management system that can be used to facilitate scholarship eligibility, timely invoicing/payments, expenditure reporting, documentation of compliance with UPK rules, and presentation of UPK program service data.

Electronic Jury Questionnaires The San Francisco Superior Court is seeking to replace their current paper questionnaires with a technology solution that would allow jurors to enter their responses through tablets/via kiosk and connect that information to a database accessible to judicial officers and counsel.

Improved Communication with Jurors The San Francisco Superior Court is seeking an efficient and user-friendly technology solution to improve and enhance its communications with jurors and staff. This solution will utilize information from the jury management system to respond to juror requests to postpone service, report disqualification, and request excuse via e-mail and text.

Digital Knowledge Portal to Memorialize Actions and Decisions of Experienced Staff The state of Arizona is seeking to create a knowledge portal that will enable senior staff to input and share their experiences and knowledge with new or junior staff using the Google Suite.

Do you have a solution on the market or under development that could be applied to one of these cases? Head to www.cityinnovate.com/challenge to learn more and apply today to partner with government to solve data challenges.

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