City of Denton, Facebook.
The idea for the dashboard came about after Aimee Kaslik, the city’s chief strategy officer, joined the organization last September.
When Kaslik first took on the role, she said, “I started looking at the city’s strategic plan and all other plans, including our economic strategic plan, parks master plan, comprehensive plan and ADA transition plan, and ended up lining the credenza behind me with plans.
“It got to the point,” she said, “that I shook my head and was like, how am I even doing this?”
As a result, consolidation became Kaslik’s top priority, resulting in a partnership with Envisio in December 2022 to digitize the city’s plans. Two months later, Denton launched its public-facing dashboard, highlighting the following initiatives:
- Pursue organizational excellence and collaborative and respectful leadership
- Enhance infrastructure and mobility
- Foster economic opportunity and affordability
- Strengthen community and quality of life
- Support healthy and safe communities
- Promote sustainability and the environment
“We got it up and running in just a couple of months, getting the structure put in place and all of the initiatives built out and departments trained on what they needed to do to ensure that we were communicating our progress on the different initiatives,” Kaslik said.
Now, the system sends reminders to each department monthly, reminding them to update any initiatives they are working on.
At the time, Kaslik said, “The biggest challenge was just in making sure that we really captured everything that needed to be captured and weeding out what is strategic versus everyday operations.”
The city was starting from “a place of nothing” in terms of this type of tracking system, she said.
“People were using the tools they had available to them at the time. So, going from what departments were or, in some cases, were not using to track the work being done to a purpose-built system, people immediately saw the value of that.”
Now, by clicking one of the six initiatives highlighted on the public dashboard, users can get more information about how the city implements technology to drive performance and improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
For example, according to the dashboard, the city is currently on track to implement a vendor management and accounts payable automation system and a customer relationship management system. Also listed as in progress is a project to improve grant management, which involves creating standardized processes for how grants are applied for, managed and closed out.
Regarding future technology projects, the dashboard highlights an upcoming enterprise resource system assessment project that would determine how the city will replace its current system with a more modernized enterprise resource planning system.
More information about the city’s information technology strategic efforts can be found online.
