Boston gives innovation a job description

Rapid technology advances create almost limitless potential. Santiago Garces, Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston, wanted to step back and help the Department of Innovation and Technology cut through the noise to focus on what is important.

“There’s an interesting identity crisis in our area around innovation and technology,” he said during an interview at the recent Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. “It’s very easy for us with technology to get excited about all the things that we could do.”

A new strategy published in the summer aims to provide more clarity. Garces says the document lays out a “common narrative of who we are, why we exist and what is the problem that we’re trying to solve.”

Mayor Michelle Wu has set three key priorities for Boston: doing small things right to get to bigger things, getting ‘City Hall out of City Hall’, and embracing the possibilities for Boston. She has outlined goals around a greener, more equitable and family-friendly city.

Along with employees, advisors and former city CIOs, Garces translated this into three focus areas for his team: products and services, governance and policy, and bridging connectivity gaps.

He said: “It has been an enabler because it gives better framing for things like the guidelines on the use of generative AI. It says that when we’re embracing those possibilities with this new technology, it’s not just because of the technology, it’s because the technology might enable use cases that level the playing field for the constituents when they interact with us.”

Progress

In the past few years, Boston has reduced the number of households without broadband connectivity from around 12 percent to five percent. The goal is to drive this down to under one percent over the next five years.

A major concern, though, is the uncertain future of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program and Garces said the city is trying to raise awareness with Congress and advocate for the benefit to be continued.

In the area of governance and policy, Boston created new guidelines and standards for collecting gender data.

Garces said: “Traditionally, government has created experiences that are not affirming and that can be quite undignified for people.”

He said listening to feedback from community members including transgender and non-binary people was “humbling”, with some saying they didn’t believe their concerns would be taken on board.

Some people don’t feel safe or comfortable sharing their gender identity and this can be a barrier to accessing services, Garces said.

The guidelines state that gender data should not be collected unless it is necessary to determine eligibility or deliver a service. The gender identity question has been removed from the marriage certificate process, for example.

If departments need to collect gender data to reduce disparities and improve services, the guidelines state they should not collect it at the start of the process but later through a survey. Standardised ways to collect the data have been provided.

Garces said: “This new way of governance is saying we need to be adaptable, we need to listen to people, and then we need to issue guidelines and start working now on delivering changes in our experiences throughout the entire organisation.”