Brittany:

Homelessness is a critical issue for cities and counties in Southern California. Can you describe how the Connect App works and its impact in Santa Monica?

Brittany:

Some of the top challenges for CIOs in 2021 are slashed budgets, managing a digital workforce, digital collaboration, and home network security to name a few.

 What would you say are your top challenges this year?

Joseph Cevetello:

Connect was a public/private partnership with Akidolabs, an innovative software development start-up that is connected to USC’s D-Health initiative. The problem we sought to address: Santa Monica allocates a great deal of effort and resources to address homelessness across multiple departments including Police, Fire, and Human Services, but data and insights between these groups were not easily shared. We had data and information on outcomes and solutions, but this data was siloed within departments, and there was no immediate, comprehensive, understanding of what we were doing, or how we were doing with any individual in particular. Connect is a data-sharing platform that allows us to safely and securely share data between our departments with strong privacy protections at its core.  It allows us to provide a higher quality of care and know the totality of our efforts in real-time. Connect allows us to utilize the data behind these interactions more fluidly to gain insights and provide them to individuals who directly interact with the homeless through the Connect mobile App.

It is a remarkable tool that involved a great deal of collaboration between not just the departments I mentioned, but also our City Manager’s Office, City Attorney’s Office, and Information Services to ensure we had a solution that protected privacy while allowing for more coordinated response and solutions. No City had ever attempted something like Connect before and we are very pleased that Santa Monica and Akidolabs were able to innovate this solution together.

Joseph Cevetello:

The two big challenges for government, as we come out of the pandemic, are first to continue to accelerate digitization and digital governance, and second to embrace a new model for providing constituents with a customer experience that people expect. Ironically, despite tight budgets and the loss of IT staff, our digitization efforts have accelerated in Santa Monica. The reason is simple: when people were remote, and with City Hall closed to the public, we had to embrace digital technologies to provide the constituents with the ability to conduct business with the City.  So much of the work of the City had to continue and this includes many of the constituent-centric services like submitting construction plans, plan reviews, and applying for and issuing permits. Before COVID, these processes were optimized for face-to-face interactions and paper.  The pandemic flipped that paradigm on its head, and we had to quickly optimize for the remote or virtual. Suddenly, we were being asked to digitize everything and provide a virtual or digital solution as quickly as possible. The past year has been a unique moment and opportunity to remove barriers to innovation and digitization. It has been extremely positive for the City, and I believe our constituents. However, I wonder how we will be able to keep the current momentum as we transition back to in-person environments and if the desire for change will continue at the present clip or will slow down. My team is certainly going to do our best to continue to transform at the current pace. 

Second, I think it will be essential for governments to empathize more extensively with their constituents to create a better customer experience with less friction. Usually, when people think of governments, they do not think of an entity that optimizes for reducing friction in interactions. Most people think of governments as maximizing friction. That must change, and it should and will in Santa Monica because the attributes of digital tools allow us to be more nimble, agile, targeted, and responsive. For me, the touchstones of providing an excellent customer experience are companies like Amazon, which have so completely changed retail by reducing friction. How can governments be immune to forces that Amazon has introduced? Or, asked in another way - in an Amazon world what do government services look like?

Brittany:

What was your biggest lesson from the pandemic and how do you plan on preparing for the next disaster?

Joseph Cevetello:

One of my big takeaways was how vital and important a well-constructed Technology Strategic plan can be. Three years ago, we engaged in a very robust, City-wide effort to construct a strategic technology plan for the City.  It involved all IT staff and over 75 staff from other departments, as well as community participation. It was facilitated over 6 months in 12 different workshops, and we arrived at a Strategic Technology Plan that is a public, living plan that anyone in our community can view at the Santa Monica Strategic Technology webpage.  

I call this out because three important outcomes/goals of this plan were essential to our Covid response:

• Design for Digital First
• Be Cloud-first and mobile aware
• Anytime, Anywhere, Secure

Since the creation of the plan, my organization has been focused on ensuring we meet these goals.  When I arrived at Santa Monica in 2017, there was no staff wireless network, no laptops, and just about everything was done on paper including requiring “wet” signatures on just about everything.  Over the last three years, we have saved over 140,000 staff hours, and millions of dollars, through digital signature and digital workflows.  Over 85% of our workforce have laptops or other mobile technology allowing for the same computing experience whether here in the City work location, or remote.  When the pandemic hit, we were able to transition from five people teleworking to over 800 in 36 hours. We were able to support this huge shift on City-issued technology because we had been building the capacity and capability in response to our strategic goals/outcomes. No other municipality in Southern California was able to do this, in such a short period of time, so comprehensively, and securely.  It was not because the City anticipated a pandemic, it was because the City took our strategic plan that enabled flexibility, capability, and capacity to support staff to be productive wherever they are.  

Our strategic plan made a difference; it kept us focused on achieving and operationalizing the above goals/outcomes, which allowed us to be agile, responsive, and productive during this crisis. We were lucky, as we had been planning this for years, but as Branch Rickey famously said, “Luck is the residue of design.”

Brittany:

Congrats on your recent achievement, Joseph! 

Can you share which innovations have contributed to Santa Monica being recognized as five in the nation among cities for improving digital customer experience?

Joseph Cevetello:

Thank you, Brittany, and thanks for the invite to speak with you.

The two innovations that were called out were the work that Santa Monica has done on the Connect App, a first-of-its-kind mobile application to provide increased situational awareness of homelessness, allowing the City to deliver more targeted and better outcomes. And the second, the development of a GPS-centric technology solution to prevent scooters from operating on Santa Monica’s sidewalks.

JOSEPH CEVETELLO
Chief Information Officer
City of Santa Monica

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BRITTANY JONES
Director, Business Development
SDI Presence

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