Digital Services

The City of Syracuse Digital Services team facilitates digital change and transformation. We design and deliver digital experiences for our employees and constituents, enabling modern and accessible city services. We believe in digital services designed by the community, for the community.

Priorities

  1. To focus on the reduction of technical debt and unsupported platforms.
  2. To create a landscape that is easier to maintain with great sustainability.
  3. To focus on a better experience for end-users (internal and external).
  4. To create a network of services that empowers departments to maintain and enable process control and management.
  5. To achieve increased public confidence in our ability to deliver city resources.
  6. To improve our approach to data management for advanced analytics.

 

Create a simplified digital landscape

  • Focus on adopting enterprise tools.
  • Create Standard Operating Procedures and frameworks for supporting platforms.
  • Build and sustain a manageable technology stack.

Platform modernization

  • To promote a cloud-first approach to technology.
  • Identifying and addressing aging technical debt/infrastructure.

Prioritize people, process, then technology

  • To advocate for a standard implementation methodology with a holistic framework approach.
  • Use technology as one of many solutions, not a silver bullet solution.

Advance internal and external service delivery

  • Improve accessibility and decrease complexity of internal (operational) and external (public-facing) digital services.
  • Improve the quality and response time of internal/external digital services.

Mitigate risk

  • To focus on prioritizing cybersecurity, role based access, and controls.
  • Actively monitor for vulnerabilities during and after implementation of major platforms.
  • Drive ongoing analysis of platform resiliency, historical data archiving, and disaster recovery.

 

Pillars & Guiding Principles

 

Centralized coordination, procurement, and design review

  1. Transform software procurement process to include a technical design sign-off.
  2. Review applications against security standards, protocols, technology stack, and data governance standards.
  3. Centralized account management/ SOP's around vendor management.
  4. Procure new technology with an enterprise approach and limit one-off department requests.

Performance improvement and business process transformation

  1. Assess current state processes and propose improvements prior to implementing new digital solutions.
  2. Implement commercial off-the-shelf software packages with industry best practices, redesigning business processes as required to improve operations and minimize customization.

Agile Transformation: Modularity and iterative security-focused design

  1. Promote legacy retirement approach to application/system replacement
  2. Include auditable security measures as part of the initial architecture and design as solutions are developed and implemented.
  3. Reduce reliance on legacy on-premise software, promote open web-based platforms with dedicated support teams and SLA's to reduce down-time.

Cost optimization

  1. Adopt enterprise platforms for multiple use cases wherever possible.
  2. Consolidate licensing of multiple platforms for similar use cases.
  3. Creative contracts - milestone and time/attendance approach to vendor services for implementation.
  4. Adopt shared/managed services modules where applicable.