Our pursuit of innovation
In February of 2021, we were sent on a mission to address a process for our Human Resources department's Employee Update and Personnel Requisition forms. These form's 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…
Listen to Mayor Walsh articulate his vision for the City, and you will hear him describe his goal to transform Syracuse into a more data-driven city. But that process is not something that just happens on its own; it takes work and a data-driven culture needs to be nurtured. When the Federal Government passed the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) to provide funding to state and local governments around the United States in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Syracuse received $123 million and the Mayor saw this as an opportunity to foster and promote better data practices throughout the City.
If you've read our blogs, visited our office, or been to our workshops, chances are you'll see process maps at some point. My colleague Jess wrote a great blog post about it. Process mapping is a tool that has become an integral part of a larger body of work that encompasses about a quarter of most "innovation" projects handed to us -- the problem identification phase.
The role and mission of our team has been constantly evolving since our inception as a Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Team in 2015. As part of a cohort of I-Teams, our team members spent the majority of our efforts focused on solving one high-priority issue per year. Past priority areas have included: Water and Road Infrastructure, Economic Opportunity, Housing Stability, Permitting, and Quality of Life.
In our current iteration as the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation, over time our mission has grown to take on a larger and more diverse set of challenges, including leading cross-department change management and data analysis projects, operating an open data portal, guiding the City’s data infrastructure and governance, and managing the City’s performance management strategy, among other supporting roles and responsibilities.
As this transition gradually occurred over time, we found ourselves spread too thin, with too many projects and not enough team members to adequately support our many initiatives. To help address this, we instituted three changes to how our team operates so that we can better serve our colleagues across City departments and deliver better services to our fellow City residents.
On February 19th, some members of our Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API), Nico Diaz (Chief Innovation and Data Officer), and Jason Scharf (Data Program Manager) had the pleasure to be part of CuseHacks' 2022 Hackathon. These events generally last somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, where teams break up and compete against each other to create innovative web applications, websites, maps, or design products to help solve different challenges. Some Hackathons have themes and some have different prizes for different categories.
CuseHacks is a Student-run Hackathon put on by Syracuse University students every year. Our API team was very excited at the chance to partner with CuseHacks and help sponsor this event.
Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.
Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.
We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.
In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.
Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.
