For many municipal governments, digital transformation means implementing a citizen-focused e-government initiative. For others, the transformation centers on the modernization of legacy systems.
In the case of the City of Fort Worth, Texas, digital transformation started with its business processes.
Fixing the Forms
The reason Fort Worth began with its processes makes sense when you realize the enormous growth pressure the city is under. “We’ve been experiencing a huge influx of people, businesses as well as tourists,” explained Kevin Gunn, Chief Technology Officer at City of Fort Worth, Texas. “Lots of growth and new construction comes with a demand for city services.”
However, more growth for the city doesn’t mean more people for its government. “Today, the challenge is that we’re competing for labor, and we can’t compete on price,” Gunn said. “There are constraints on the growth of our workforce. People need to be more efficient.”
This need for efficiency quickly led to a discussion of forms, as paper forms were ubiquitous across the city government, from permit applications to health insurance benefits. “A lot of work was driven by forms,” Gunn said. “We were doing it on paper, which was error prone and introduced delays.”
Digitizing forms is a common modernization tactic, of course – from the fat clients of the 1980s to the web-based forms of the 1990s and the portable document formats that became popular in the 2000s.
However, none of these now-established approaches fit the bill for the city. “We decided to take the forms to digital and make the whole lifecycle digital,” Gunn said. “We looked at Microsoft Word format, portable document formats like PDFs.”
However, these document-centric approaches fell short. The problem: the level of complexity some forms required. “We had lots of requirements for simple to complex, dynamic forms, for example, benefits selection,” Gunn explained. “We had predefined and ad hoc workflows.”
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/12/27/city-of-fort-worth-kicks-off-digital-transformation-in-unlikely-place/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, BP Logix is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Glen E. Ellman.
