How to Break Down Silos and Leverage Platform Technology

One of the most critical components of any operational entity is its data. For municipalities, data comes in many forms. It is voter registration information, credit card details, website traffic, annual bid submission statistics, and everything in between that is critical to allowing you to serve your citizens. Create in your mind an image of your data. Picture it in whichever form comes organically. If you are like many, your mind immediately conjures individual rolls of walled data, stored securely in identifiable locations. A piece of data can then easily be pulled from its place in storage, used, and put back. It never mingles or mixes with the data around it to protect its integrity.

In this way, your mental image of a typical data storage center is likely akin to a spice rack. Each spice is stored in a labeled bottle and pulled from its designated spot in a repository of data, used, and returned. This approach is the optimal solution for how local governments must store data—in individual silos to protect and preserve it. Right? Maybe the spice rack storage system was ideal in 2010, but now it’s 2019.

For decades local governments have been reliant upon siloed software systems that house—often redundant—stores of data. The systems never intermingle, and they never share data. If this seemed like the best way to preserve the integrity of each system’s data, in reality, it produces data redundancy, errors, and duplicative workflows. Local governments no longer have the time, funds, or human resources to continue to operate and maintain siloed systems, nor are the new rules of citizen engagement willing to accommodate such narrow data applications.

Thanks to an ever-expanding universe of interconnected systems and devices (think: The Internet of Things or IoT), today’s citizens expect a streamlined digital experience with every entity in which they interact. Today, citizens can listen to an audiobook through the dashboard of their car in the morning, continue it using a phone app during their lunch break, and finish it that night using an e-reader. Give these advancements, they certainly expect that the same username and password they use to pay their utility bill on their city’s public works web page should also allow them to register for a swimming class on the parks and rec page. And that they only need to log in once.

Public and private entities can no longer maintain data in siloed systems. The spice rack method no longer accommodates the type of data sharing that saves both administrators and users time and effort and improves digital engagement experiences. Today, entities must instead think of data like students at recess. The students are safely kept in a single classroom, kept secure by their teacher who maintains both order and security. During recess, the students travel to the playground where they interact with any piece of playground equipment that they would like. They rock on teeter-totters and climb ladders, and work together to build sandcastles. When recess is over, they travel back together to their single classroom for safekeeping.

This student playground methodology exemplifies the approach that local government content managers and IT teams must take to storing and utilizing their data. When municipalities invest in a single, secure data repository to store all civic and citizen data and then connect that data hub to essential third-party systems via application program interfaces (API), any mission-critical application can leverage the necessary data. No data redundancy, no data errors, no logging in and out of disparate software systems.

Here are six more reasons why smart cities and counties can no longer rely on disparate data stores.

Software applications should automate processes and workflows and allow for the sharing of data across teams, departments, and geographic regions.