The Challenge

The expectations citizens have placed on their local governments have risen dramatically in the digital era as customer service technologies have made rapid advancements. Facing plunging levels of trust, agencies across the world must become more transparent and accountable while also achieving enlarged mission scopes with reduced budgets.

Richmond was an early adopter of smart city technology, however its existing citizen response system was essentially three different solutions by three separate vendors that maintained their systems independent of each other. At times, data was siloed, leaving no option to produce unified reports. It was also not shared externally with citizens and the feedback loop with the requestor was limited.

There was also no centralized channel to report problems or make requests of the city. Citizens would call the Richmond call center, their councilperson’s office, an agency directly, or they’d just send an email to someone they knew.

Once submitted, the application to indicate location also did not interact with ArcGIS, making it so that addresses could often not be found in the City’s system. This created an inefficient process where field and operations staff had to manually pinpoint requests to locations.

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney wanted the Richmond government to be more transparent and responsive to citizens through technology.