Three Large CA Governments Ranked Top Digital Counties

Three of California’s largest counties by population recently won top honors in the yearly Digital Counties survey from the Center for Digital Government.*

Scattered across Northern and Southern California and the Inland Empire, these local governments won plaudits for their citizen-facing services, future planning and technology updates. Here’s a bit more on their accomplishments:

• Alameda County, in the eastern Bay Area, rose to fourth place this year in the population category of 1 million or more by resolving staffing issues and moving enterprise to the cloud. The county took a cloud-first approach, moving enterprise infrastructure to VMware’s virtualization platform, and integrating with Microsoft’s Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Still in progress, the move has migrated more than 150 virtualized services so far to AVS and more than 100 terabytes of data to the Nasuni cloud NAS. The county’s IT department also updated its Centralized Technology Policy this year.
• San Diego County took sixth place for the second year in a row, furthering its work on citizen-centric service and in planning for the future. It created a new digital experience team within its office of technology, which then forged new standards on readability, usability and search functionality. A new engagement hub targets citizen engagement, and county child protective services has adopted two-way text messaging to boost engagement with those it serves. San Diego County has also automated the distribution of child welfare reports and orders to private systems, moving many off paper and saving an estimated $75,000 annually.
• San Bernardino County tied for seventh place. Officials are creating a new IT strategic plan and updating job classifications; in the wake of this refresh, IT has hired dozens of staff and contractors. San Bernardino recently stood up a new website that standardizes the look of department pages. The county has also committed to becoming a data-driven organization — its Department of Public Works partnered with the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Innovation Hub to use ArcGIS tools to acquire real-time GPS data from snowplows to better manage operations in snowstorms. And its Assessor-Recorder Clerk is using a tech-equipped RV to bring document services to neighborhoods.
  

*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, parent company of Industry Insider — California.

This story first appeared in Government Technology magazine, Industry Insider — California’s sister publication.