Our pursuit of innovation
Personnel requisition and employee update processes are vital to ensuring that new employees can be hired, current employees can retire, and any other employment status changes can be processed in an accurate and timely manner. Through mapping the process and keeping benchmarks of our progress on this project, API is trying to identify every possible place where process changes could be made.
In 2018 our former Director of Innovation started a program over the summer aimed at changing the innovative culture in City Hall with the aspirations of identifying and executing a process improvement project that was meaningful and would impact a number of departments. The API office's ideation luncheon sparked the interest of many and we got a variety of ideas and suggestions.
Syracuse’s effort to join the league of smart cities has led to a significant increase in the number of projects and the amount of data generated from them. As more projects are taken up, it becomes equally important to ensure the quality, security, efficiency, and timely completion of those projects, and to achieve that, we needed to implement formal project management practices that were standardized across the board.
In 2019 the City of Syracuse received 1,703 Freedom of Information Law requests to the Legal Department. There is a lawyer on staff who until now spent the majority of his time handling requests understanding the request, working cross-departmentally to consolidate information, and respond in kind. This became a huge financial and resource burden on the Legal Department exasperated by COVID-19 and the work from home and furloughs that came with it.
