Your Government » Departments & Offices » Information Technology

Digital Services

Digital Services Objective

The City of San Jose faces new challenges with the global pandemic, the ensuing economic downturn and a heightened call to ensure equity for its residents, sparking community and organizational discussions about its services. The City must transform at the pace of these challenges. One focus area is how the City “tools” the organization to innovate through data, responsive services, and upskilling City team members to drive change.

Strategy and Execution Image


San Jose is very focused on the symbiotic relationship between 1) building a strategy centered around resident’s needs and 2) building an execution strategy that empowers the City employees to best serve their customers.


Harvard Business School Community Partners (HBSCP) is a nonprofit program offering curated volunteer experiences that enable HBS alumni to channel their skills & experience for social good. 

 

City of San Jose and HBSCP was engaged to help the City develop a portion of the broader City Digital Strategy, specifically focused on understanding resident’s needs. They did a tremendous amount of work to understand the City of San Jose resident’s needs by: 

  • Doing an online survey to get direct feedback from the residents
  • Interviewing key City of SJ department leaders to understand their view of the specific needs of their customers
  • Reviewed prior City documents detailing various activities already done regarding digital services, such as studies, surveys, resident reviews, audits, etc.
  • Interviewing Community Business Organizations to understand the unique challenges of specific communities with greater needs
  • Interviewed other cities both domestic and international, as well as city experts, to understand how they have addressed resident’s needs and the processes they took that delivered success

common themes for approaches imageThe City of San Jose, located in the heart of innovation for the world, is already a Smart City leader. The approaches detailed are designed to help the City frame their long-term digital strategy in a manner that:

  1. Keeps the customer needs at the center
  2. Address Inclusion & Equity issues in a way that works specifically for these communities
  3. Builds upon the digital-first mindset that the pandemic accelerated
  4. Empowers employees and augments the culture to enable the next wave of progress

Digital Services Objectives

Further details of the project are in the attached presentation