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North Bay City Plans New Service Model, Deeper Data Use

Recognizing the value in avoiding "day-to-day fires" while providing around-the-clock service to public safety, one Northern California city is contemplating a new service model as officials also prepare a draft strategic framework for their work in digital service and open government.

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Roughly three months after the reorganization and expansion of its IT department, one North Bay city is planning what’s next in becoming data-driven, and updating its service model.

San Rafael, the Marin County seat, appointed longtime employee Rebecca Woodbury as its director of digital services and open government in April, tasking her with leading a reconfigured IT department with a greater focus on data analytics, performance measurement, user-centered service design and community engagement. These and other tech-forward values underpin the city’s draft strategic framework, released in May, which heads to the city council for discussion on Aug. 5. Among the takeaways:

• San Rafael is currently evaluating vendor responses to an RFP that would enable the city to shift its service model from one of staff augmentation — seven digital services department staffers plus contractors — to managed IT services. Its longstanding model has become “kind of unmanageable over time,” Woodbury said. Additionally, the agency is too small to provide the type of 24/7 service that public safety needs, and which it will expect from a provider. But the company selected, Woodbury added, will likely become more of a partner with the city.

“Because one of the things that we’re hoping that partner can bring to us is a much stronger skill set and deeper expertise in some of these foundational things that we should be doing differently," Woodbury said, citing the examples of migrating to a hardened data center and developing a hybrid cloud strategy.

• Migrating to a managed service model won’t necessarily cost the city less money — but will instead enable it to reallocate IT resources in a more efficient way. San Rafael might, for example, recoup the time of two IT employees who now spend “a lot of their time fighting day-to-day fires,” Woodbury said. The city will also look closely at user types and whether it can save money by creating more “mobile users,” which are less costly than “desktop users,” for staff positions like police officer, firefighter and childcare worker who may not need a full desktop application.

“We’re also looking at ... our service delivery model and what we’ve traditionally provided in-house versus what would make more sense to outsource and structure differently,” Woodbury said.

• Four values underpin San Rafael’s draft strategic framework: technology modernization; data use and analytics; service design; and open engagement. Tech modernization, at the bottom of the “pyramid,” is there because it’s “incredibly critical,” the director said, noting officials will simultaneously work on other framework areas.

Becoming data-driven, however, is also of high interest to other city agencies; and IT officials have planned that process as well. They’ve reclassified the city’s GIS analyst to a data analyst, empowering him to expand his skill set to look at how San Rafael uses data. And the city will work with a strategic consultant on data, in part to ensure initiatives connect fully to the people behind the numbers.

• During the next year, officials will also draft a technology improvement plan, a first, to look at systems and their shelf lives, enterprise-wide. The goal, the director said, isn’t necessarily to spearhead the replacement of all systems — but to prioritize which need attention first, and to ensure new systems the city procures will be flexible; that vendors have application programming interfaces (APIs); and that new additions play well with older components “so we don’t lock ourselves into, I think, some of the problems that government has locked itself into in the past,” Woodbury said.

Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.