High-Value, Sustainable Technology

 High-Value, Sustainable Technology
Technology has the power and potential to fuel meaningful and positive change in how the city operates and serves its constituents.

To realize this potential, our technology must be adaptable, scalable, and clearly aligned with the city’s most pressing business priorities. For the highest citywide impact, we must minimize siloed decision-making through enterprise architecture-enabled investments and collaborative strategic planning and governance processes. As many of the city’s mission-critical systems are underpinned by aging technologies, we must accelerate the replacement of underperforming assets to free up valuable resources and divert more focus toward innovating resident-facing services.

To achieve a high-impact, sustainable technology landscape, we must advance core capabilities – such as enterprise architecture – to align IT investments with business priorities, rationalize duplicative systems into standardized platforms, and speed up solution development through strategic adoption of low-code/no-code solutions.

We must also optimize procurement and contracting processes to enable more agility, transparency, and accountability around technology acquisition, deployment, and maintenance.

#enterprise_architecture; #IT_procurement

Decades-old, end-of-life systems siphon off valuable city staff and vendor resources. Through initiatives such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) replacement, we will accelerate the shift to more sustainable cloud-based solutions while integrating across departmental systems and data. Beyond technology, we must commit to process change in order to alleviate operational inefficiencies and enhance responsiveness to constituents.

#legacy_modernization; #process_improvement

To maximize the city’s buying power and improve economies of scale, we must adopt a “One Chicago” approach to technology investment. By standing up citywide planning and governance processes that include leaders from city departments, the Mayor’s Office, and central IT, we will promote a holistic mindset, support city departments’ unique missions, and increase collaboration, learning, and re-use. 

#citywide_IT_governance