The City of St. Louis: Digitising the American Frontier
For those who don’t know the City of St. Louis, one thing is clear; it is faithfully committed to its people.
Sitting in the Midwest state of Missouri, St. Louis was an important transportation hub that helped shape the growth of the United States. It is positioned at the meeting point of two of the largest rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi.
The city was originally built for upwards of 900,000 residents. However, after the Second World War, de-industrialisation led to a lot of the population leaving for the suburbs. Now, with a population of nearly 300,000 people, the city’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Simon Huang explains that maintaining the city’s infrastructure across a large surface area is a significant challenge.
“In the past, there has been an underinvestment in IT in general and so the departments have taken it upon themselves to bolster their own technology,” says Simon. “This has gone ahead in a very fragmented fashion.”
In order to standardise technology and make systems more efficient across St. Louis, Simon explains that his team is advocating for greater operations coordination and education efforts.
“Getting support from the executive level down and driving the same message in conjunction with ensuring that our IT department is as competent and as professional as they need to be to earn the confidence of all the departments they support,” he explains.
As CTO for the City of St. Louis and St. Louis Development Corporation, Simon Huang reports to Mayor Tishaura O. Jones. He bears a crucial responsibility to support her vision in building a stronger, safer and healthier St. Louis, working closely with IT departments and external vendors and partners on implementing digital initiatives for greater innovation.
“I focus on modernising city operations through technology so that we can have a more efficient and responsive city,” he says. “I aim to enhance service delivery for our stakeholders, both internal and external and foster equitable access to technology for all St. Louisans.”
Forming a digital frontier
As with any geographically large city, St. Louis faces many challenges in terms of ensuring its residents are digitally connected. Significantly, as Simon has explained, a lot of the city’s infrastructure has not been updated in a substantial length of time.
“For example, our lighting infrastructure, which a lot of cities depend on for smart city initiatives, is based on an old electrical grid that's going to take a lot to upgrade across the city,” he adds. “There is also a large network of roads that need to be constantly maintained, which impacts the amount of dollars that might be available for other improvement initiatives.”
Moving away from legacy technology is essential in order to thrive in the modern world. The City of St. Louis’ modernisation strategy is vital because it allows the city to be more efficient and responsive to resident needs, in addition to saving costs to focus more on transformative projects.
“Legacy systems and a multitude of platforms are also harder to maintain and support and don't offer the features that allow us to have better customer contact, enhanced service delivery and efficiency in operations,” Simon notes. “We currently have a project to migrate off the mainframe. It's a huge consumer of power and when you only have a few systems running on it, it's not financially efficient.
“We hope this will set us up on a better foundation to be more responsive citizens, to avail ourselves of industry advances, to enable us to deliver services better and also to address talent challenges in supporting legacy systems,” he explains. “We've recently completed an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation for both HR and Finance, so those systems are now all electronic instead of paper-based payroll processes.
“We are also embarking on an ambitious Digital Front Door project so that we understand and get a better view of all the transactions a resident might be conducting with the city of St. Louis. This will give them a single unified platform and reduce any friction that they may have in doing business with the city in addition to getting us closer to a 360 degree view of our constituents.”
Simon explains that technology is just one part of the solution, suggesting that the city is eager to make investments into staff training and development to power digital progress.
“In IT, we always talk about the people, the process and the technology,” he remarks. “We are moving more services online to be available 24/7 so we don't require the physical presence of people to transact business and trying to move to accept online payments for every kind of application for a single sign-on solution.”
This is also going to make doing business within the city simpler by reducing manual processes and increasing their transparency.
Giving residents power
Like many other cities across the United States, St. Louis holds a significant divide known by residents as the Delmar Divide. The line represents socioeconomic and racial differences between certain parts of the city which, as Simon explains, are as a result of historically discriminatory laws and policies that the city is trying to reverse.
Technology also plays its part, as Simon notes: “The northern section of the city is unfortunately heavily disadvantaged. As you can imagine, their ability to pay for services like internet access or a computer is severely hindered, because it correlates very well with poverty and people don't have the luxury of paying for subscriptions.
“About 25% of households don’t have a computer and we realise that, if we do not address this, the divide will only grow larger and limit access to education, job opportunities and all the online systems the city and its businesses offer.”
In response, the City of St. Louis invested in building a strategic plan in 2023 to tackle some of these issues. The St. Louis Digital Inclusion Action Plan was the result: an outline of priorities that the city can embark upon with the aim of improving equitable access to high-speed internet and the digital skills needed to succeed in contemporary society
“It’s actually focusing a lot of investment to correct the results of all this disinvestment over the years,” Simon explains. “The city set aside some ARPA funding for implementation of the digital inclusion action plan and I'm happy to report that out of the 10 recommendations, we've already initiated eight of them. We now have a two-year window to get the rest of them completed.”
Part of these plans include introducing programmes like community Wi-Fi across the city’s recreation centres, digital literacy education classes and community centres.
SmartWAVE Technologies: Confronting the digital divide
A significant ongoing project is making free Wi-Fi available in city parks to address affordability and access issues within the digital divide. This is being completed in partnership with SmartWAVE Technologies, a leading wireless centric solutions provider, that’s helping the city equip the parks with Wi-Fi.
As a vendor, SmartWAVE Technologies boasts plenty of experience in wireless infrastructure and municipal expertise in other cities and counties across the US.
“Since we’ve started working with them, we’ve been impressed with their professionalism, their responsiveness, attention to detail and their willingness to work collaboratively,” Simon notes. “What’s equally important is their understanding of the vision of what all these cities are trying to do - improving digital equities in the regions that they serve.”
As part of their partnership, there is a pilot programme ongoing across nine parks in areas that may not have access to high-speed Internet.
“Wi-Fi will be strategically located in certain areas of the city to understand what the adoption rate is for a service like this,” says Simon. “It considers how many people are using it, what times they use it, does it have an impact and what are the Wi-Fi users doing with this access?
“There's another pilot to understand if businesses and customers had access to Wi-Fi, what changes can we see in their adoption in order to adjust what we do with the other parks and other areas that we might consider this in.”
The initiative has been actively encouraged by the community, as residents have been waiting for better Wi-Fi access.
“[The City] has talked about increasing access to the internet and providing locations where people could go, Simon explains. “The city has recreation centres both in North and South City that make access more convenient. These centres will also offer free computer access, in addition to education and support while people are using it.
“This is in direct response to what the residents have asked for. We are very excited to gain more feedback when we go live.”
This initiative is just Phase One of the city’s partnership with SmartWAVE. Moving forward, Simon is excited to confirm that his team are in the early stages of evaluating a Phase Two to the project. Phase Two will consider implementing free Wi-Fi within certain parts of the downtown business district.
“We’re looking forward to finishing the execution of Phase One and then getting the metrics around usage and adoption of Wi-Fi and the types of traffic that we see,” he says. “SmartWave Technologies has the ability to provide us with those reports.”
Embracing a digitally transformed world
Moving forward, St. Louis shows no signs of slowing its digital transformation efforts. According to Simon, the city is more than prepared to take on the challenge as business and citizen needs evolve.
“We’re definitely excited about what gains we can achieve from different technologies,” he says. “Right now, we are in a very cautious phase of ensuring that we have the right guardrails in place before we widely adopt various tools.
“The challenge with unrestricted access to these productivity tools is understanding how that data is being used, where it's being stored and understanding the risks involved with the utilisation of these tools.”
When it comes to the inevitability of AI, Simon indicates that the city is prepared to confront the technology when it comes their way.
“I think the promise of AI is just fantastic in terms of helping us with certain processes that today require a lot of manual intervention,” he highlights. “We are working on guidance frameworks to help educate our user base about the use of these tools.
“We haven't come out with a definitive AI policy yet, but we have been exploring potential use cases for its application. For example, to provide better response for user and resident questions, to improve permitting processes in our building division and for project documentation.”
“It's definitely going to have an impact, but all of the right policies need to be in place before we leverage this exciting technology.”
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