Simon Huang

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, it is a fundamental city that ultimately helped shape the growth of the United States. Yet, as a geographically large city, St. Louis faces many challenges in terms of ensuring its residents are digitally connected, as the city’s Chief Technology Officer Simon Huang explains.

“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,” he says.

Reporting to City Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, Simon aims to standardise technology and make systems more efficient across St. Louis. He explains that his team is advocating for greater operations coordination and education efforts.

“I focus on modernising city operations through technology so that we can have a more efficient and responsive city,” he says. “I aim to 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.

“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,” says Simon.

He notes that technology is just one part of the solution, explaining 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. So, while we upgrade the technology in terms of moving services online and driving more online payments, we are also mindful of the people and process aspects by investing in staff development and competencies such as project and change management.”

Giving residents power

Like many other cities across the US, St. Louis holds a significant divide known by residents as the Delmar Divide. It represents socioeconomic and racial differences between certain parts of the city which, as Simon explains, are as a result of historically discriminatory politics that the city is trying to reverse. 

In 2023, the City published its Digital Inclusion Action plan which seeks to provide equitable access to internet and technology.

“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 online systems,” he says.

In response, the City of St. Louis has proposed the Economic Justice Action plan to invest in marginalised communities across St. Louis, particularly North City.

“It’s actually focusing a lot of investment to correct the results of all this disinvestment over the years,” Simon explains. “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.”

SmartWAVE Technologies: Confronting the digital divide

A significant ongoing project is making free Wi-Fi available across nine city parks to address affordability and access issues. This is being completed in partnership with SmartWAVE Technologies, a leading wireless centric solutions provider.

SmartWAVE Technologies boasts plenty of experience in wireless infrastructure and municipal expertise in other cities and counties across the US as it seeks to improve digital equities.

“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?”

The initiative has been actively encouraged by the community, as residents have been waiting for better Wi-Fi access.

“We’re looking forward to finishing the execution of Phase One and then getting the metrics around usage and adoption of Wi-Fi,” Simon adds. “We’re definitely excited about what gains we can achieve from different technologies.”

Read the full report HERE

**************

Make sure you check out the latest edition of Technology Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series - Tech & AI LIVE 2024

**************

Technology Magazine is a BizClik brand