El Paso Recognized in Digital Cities Awards as It Continues to Align Process With Strategy

This year’s winners of the Digital Cities awards from the Center for Digital Government* stepped up their municipalities’ digital offerings, providing citizens an array of contactless services and other conveniences delivered through modernized applications and new technology. Several cities also took huge strides to strengthen their IT workforces through additional training and benefits to both attract and retain highly qualified employees. The Texas winners were El Paso, Dallas and Allen.

Here’s the rundown of the El Paso initiatives that caught the judges’ attention. Today’s story is the first of three, originally published in Government Technology, a sister publication of Industry Insider — Texas. Stay tuned for the next two.

El Paso has been consistently lauded for its innovative approach to citizen services and workforce. The unique municipality with nearly 884,000 residents sits at an international crossing with Mexico, and the Information Technology Department draws talent from across the region, including interns and part-time workers from the University of Texas at El Paso. The university talent pool helped redesign the city web interface in recent years.

El Paso is noted for two best practices: its internal project request review process for IT and the data-driven City Goals application. The project request documentation features ticket submission for city departments; after submission IT conducts a user interview to decide how the request aligns with strategic planning. Once the project is validated, planning commences. Requested work may include software or application development, webpage development or software licensing, customization or upgrades. There is a separate ticket request for built infrastructure requiring hardware, networking or cabling, among other tech.

The City Goals application was developed in-house to track key performance indicators across the city’s 26 departments. Here, data is brought together to link KPIs to strategic planning, which are in turn reported to the city council. The goals app also tracks individual department KPIs, including metrics such as online payment increases, social media engagement, telephone hold times, program attendance and wireless Internet.

Overall, IT priorities most closely matching city priorities include crisis response, closing the digital divide, increasing resident data privacy, transparency and improving constituent engagement.

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