PHILADELPHIA – In case you missed it, several publications including Technically Philly recently published stories about the strategic plan released by the City’s Office of Innovation and Technology.  The plan is the first of its kind for Philadelphia. It outlines current as well as future initiatives and strategies aimed at combining and leveraging technology, innovation, engagement, access and efficiency. It also reflects the changing values and roles of the City’s technology office in municipal government.

The other publications reporting on the plan are the national websites Govtech, StateScoop, and SmartCitiesDive. The full text of all four articles can be viewed below.

How the City of Philadelphia plans to use tech to drive change in government

Technically Philly // Paige Gross 

The City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) released a public-facing plan and set of strategies to drive innovation and change within city government on Wednesday.

The report, officially called the “IT Strategic Plan: An Inclusive Approach to Crafting Vision and Strategy for Technology Across City Government,” addresses how OIT and other City departments can solves challenges in response to public needs.

The process began in early spring 2018 when those in OIT began talking internally and with other departments about what the City was doing well and what it could be doing better in terms of technology, said Chief Information Officer Mark Wheeler.

The office opened those questions up to a focus group of about 30 City stakeholders, community leaders and technologists, said Andrew Buss, deputy chief information officer for innovation management. Between internal discussion and comments from stakeholders and the public, the office narrowed down a handful of themes surrounding technology and innovation:

1. Support and develop the local technology ecosystem

2. Strive for digital access and equity

3. Improve government efficiency and effectiveness

4. Enhance online public service delivery

5. Promote community-driven technology

6. Strengthen and advance internal operations and infrastructure

In the 42-page report, the department outlined goals relating to each theme, ongoing projects or programs that support them, and developing initiatives and strategies to further them.

Some of the initiatives touch on attracting and retaining tech talent to the city, making city websites and resources more accessible for residents, supporting digital literacy, and connecting with some of the city’s technology companies.

Some of the programs touted in the strategic plan are the StartupPHL Venture Program, the Digital Literacy Alliance, OpenDataPhilly and GovLabPHL. The plan also outlines developing initiatives, like CityGeo Training Sessions, which helps departments share data used for mapping, analysis and city services.

It’s not too often that internal assessments of a department are released to the public, Wheeler said, but it’s important to OIT to share the progress and intent of the office with residents and businesses.

“This is our way to tell everyone what we’ve been doing, and where we want to go next,” Wheeler said.

Stephanie Tipton, interim chief administrative officer, said themes three and four address work that the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer does, and focuses on making government work better for residents, businesses and other departments.

“It’s our way to show how we’re using our resources and to be clear about what we’re trying to do,” Tipton said.

Wheeler acknowledged that the city hasn’t been as collaborative in its past planning of use of resources, and that the department wanted that to change.

“The plan is really the first of its kind for Philadelphia and attempts to drive change,” Wheeler said. “It outlines current as well as future initiatives and strategies aimed at combining and leveraging technology, innovation, engagement, access and efficiency.”

Communities, digital equity key in Philadelphia’s ‘master’ tech plan

StateScoop // Ryan Johnston

Philadelphia officials released a citywide information technology strategy on Wednesday that lays out the city’s internal technology goals in an effort to increase transparency and boost the city’s relationship with the academic, nonprofit and private partners. Equitable access to technology, along with a strong emphasis on the city’s technology partnerships, are prominent in the report.

The strategy, released by the city’s Office of Innovation and Technology, is also a guide designed to allow the city to lay its IT strategy bare for curious residents and technology vendors. It’s divided into six themes that city Chief Information Officer Mark Wheeler said he can point to while meeting with those stakeholders: supporting the local tech ecosystem, digital equity, government efficiency and effectiveness, online public service delivery, community-driven technology, and internal operations and infrastructure. The report lists ongoing initiatives that the city is involved in to support each theme, but the real benefit will be in what others are able to learn about Wheeler’s office from the report, he said.

“This is our way to tell everyone — from academics to solution providers to the civic tech community — what we’re doing, what we have been doing and where we want to go next,” he said at a press conference Wednesday.

Andrew Buss, the city’s deputy CIO for innovation management, said the report’s contents were informed by a series of resident-filled workshops launched January 2018. Each group targeted one of the report’s categories. For the digital access and equity category, for instance, the workshops led to an acknowledgement of the city’s grant-based digital literacy work, but the report also announces Philadelphia will search for a digital literacy coordinator to centralize and shape its digital-literacy policy. To improve digital access, the report shares a plan to develop unique property and building identification numbers across city agencies, as well as a new civic-data initiative with Johns Hopkins University.

“We understand that there’s a lot of work we can do in educating people about the potential uses of our data that we’re releasing as open data in our tools,” Wheeler said. “I think this is one way to get information back from residents about what kind of data analytics do you really want to see us measuring and incorporating into some project.”

The strategy includes other civic technology announcements, such as the city’s plan to launch a traffic-accident portal within the next two months, as well as a new platform for managing project pitches called “Pitch and Pilot.” To avoid technology vendors or universities pitching connected technologies that may not solve problems Philadelphia has, the city will instead use the platform to pitch its problems to them and ask for custom-built solutions. The idea is to help the vendor community “fully understand where we are grounded in technology,” Wheeler said.

Philadelphia’s SmartCityPHL roadmap, which includes the pitch platform, was released in February as a guide for the city’s emerging technology programs, detailing processes the city should embrace to support internet-connected technologies that directly benefit residents. Wheeler said that Wednesday’s report, in comparison with the roadmap, is a “master” plan intended to align the goals of the city’s tech community, residents and city government.

“I think you’ll get a much better sense in this report that when we said in SmartCityPHL that communities and equity were our biggest pillars, we meant it,” Wheeler said. “You can’t walk away from this plan and not get a sense that we’re not committed to trying to do more around digital literacy and looking at communities in a more holistic way, how they can better use the technology we’re trying to provide and how we’re trying to do better service delivery for everyone.”

Philadelphia’s IT plan focuses on digital equity, tech coordination

SmartCitiesDive // Jason Plautz

Dive Brief:

• The City of Philadelphia has released its first IT Strategic Plan to coordinate and plan the use of technology across the city government and outline strategies to improve digital equity in the city.

• The 42-page plan came out of several focus groups that included city officials, community organizations, academics and industry partners. The project was designed to highlight both public-facing work and internal technology developments in the city government.

• As part of the strategic plan, the city plans to create a role to coordinate digital literacy work to establish a “collaborative model for connecting existing and future initiatives across departments.” That includes continuing support of city initiatives, like the KEYSPOT network of publicly available computers.

Dive Insight:

The strategic plan reflects the fact that IT has moved from a largely internal, behind-the-scenes department to one that has a public role and coordinates across many city departments, Andrew Buss, the city’s Deputy Chief Information Officer for Innovation Management, told Smart Cities Dive.

The strategic plan, he said, highlights how the IT office can provide “meaningful experiences with technology for citizens.” It also helps the city “be as transparent as possible” and gather input from all communities on how technology can improve their lives, he added.

It mirrors the government’s approach to smart cities work, which has prioritized community involvement through its SmartCityPHL initiative to ensure that assets are serving citizens.

The strategic plan highlights government-backed initiatives to foster digital literacy in a city where the digital divide has been widening. According to U.S. Census figures reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, the broadband penetration rate was just 71.6%, the second-lowest among the 25 largest cities.

The government has opened up technology centers and created grants through its Digital Literacy Alliance (DLA). The latest round of DLA grants, set to be announced next month, will focus on projects around the 2020 Census and a future round will reward projects focused on the immigrant community, according to Buss.

Besides implementing more tech-heavy civic initiatives, the city also plans to offer more support for the private tech industry. That includes the Pitch and Pilot program, for entrepreneurs and startups to test ideas to solve municipal challenges.

“Philadelphia has a very vibrant tech ecosystem, and a lot of our work is just facilitating that space,” Buss said. “It’s fairly new for us to tap into that local entrepreneurial community, but there’s a lot of opportunity in bringing solutions to us and helping that community grow.”

Philadelphia Sets Goals, Looks Ahead with Smart City Plan

GovTech // Patrick Groves

Philadelphia leadership unveiled a report last week highlighting IT accomplishments and plotting the city’s course for future innovation.

The 42-page strategic plan lays out six broad themes, which are broken out into goals that the city has either already accomplished or will soon undertake. The themes include the support and development of the local technology ecosystem; striving for digital access and equity; the improvement of government efficiency and effectiveness; the enhancement of online public service delivery; the promotion of community-driven technology; and the strengthening and advancement of internal operations and infrastructure.

Philadelphia CIO Mark Wheeler said the report was developed with the help of six focus groups, from academia, technology companies, nonprofits, civic tech leaders and two city government contingents.

“It has both an internal facing focus, that’s the final theme of the strategy, and much of it is about work that is going to be done across city government, not just what the Office of Innovation and Technology [OIT] would be doing,” Wheeler said during a press conference announcing the report. “It covers a whole spectrum of technology, the evolution of technology in government and how we’re trying to support both our infrastructure and meaningful interactions around technology.”

Wheeler said it’s his hope that the strategic plan will engage the public, civic tech and technology communities in the city. He credited Andrew Buss, deputy CIO for innovation management, with developing the methodology behind the report.

Buss said the focus-group-oriented approach is an effective model that requires a significant investment of time before it can come to fruition. He said he began working on the report in Spring 2018.

“Then it was a matter really of looking at the hundreds, maybe 1,000, ideas, across the focus groups,” he said. “Looking for commonalities across those so that if all five or six focus groups all came up with a similar idea that was probably something that we pulled out and thought about putting into the plan.”

According to Buss, he queried participants on what they thought worked well in the city, what officials should focus their efforts on and an aspirational goal for the future of the city.

Wheeler said the opportunity to take stock of potential projects opened the report to the incorporation of the city’s Smart City plan, which was released in February.

“That’s a very powerful initiative because it has a lot of interest in it,” Wheeler said. “We have a lot of the technology community, research providers and our colleagues around city government who really like this idea of putting smart technology, Internet of Things, real fast data analytics all together to try and solve some city problems.”

He said the strategic plan clarifies ideas that weren’t explicitly articulated in the initial Smart City announcement, such as Pitch & Pilot where the city is able to approach the private or academic sectors with a problem to solicit solutions. The goal is for the city to have the opportunity to pilot a solution rather than committing to a contract that may not meet the needs of residents, he said.

Wheeler said the city can learn much from the processes in place in the vendor and academic communities, such as how to successfully deploy large IT projects.

“What we learned is that decompressing means breaking out a large project into smaller ones and owning how those small processes should integrate and managing that process well,” he said. “That’s new to a lot of people in government, especially our project management office.”

Buss said in addition to defining the priorities of Philadelphia and where officials plan to focus resources, it’s also a tool to increase transparency. He said he wrote the report in a manner that residents could easily grasp.

“I think a lot of these plans are released internally, and you lose that opportunity to tell people what you’re doing and what your directions are and where your thoughts are,” Buss said. “I think the more that you can really inform whether it’s vendors or residents around what you’re doing the more opportunities you have to deal with.”

The concept of Pitch & Pilot to incorporate new smart city technologies isn’t unique to Philadelphia. An established example is Cary, N.C., which features a “living lab,” a test bed of city-owned buildings where companies can demonstrate their technologies. The city can use innovative solutions at no cost and the vendor community is able to showcase products to potential customers in a real-world setting.

According to the strategic plan, Philadelphia will look to the academic sector to test potential solutions from entrepreneurs and startups, among others.

“A second component of the Pitch & Pilot program will develop a model for working with local universities on research issues and testing theoretical concepts in a real-world setting,” the report states.

Philadelphia joins Phoenix; Columbus, Ohio; Montgomery, Ala.; Racine, Wis.; Boulder, Colo.; and more as cities foray into optimizing government services. Montgomery has also deployed a living lab in its downtown area, whereas Phoenix is implementing strategic partnerships with nearby universities to modernize the entire region.