Ohio County Taps Startups for Automation
- By Stephanie Kanowitz
- Mar 01, 2020
Officials in Cuyahoga
County, Ohio are looking
to digitize and automate
paper-based processes at
several agencies through
a program that encourages governments,
startups and small businesses to collaborate
on solutions.
City Innovate’s Startup in Residence
(STIR) program recently announced
that 50 civic challenges—including six in
Cuyahoga County—have been selected to
receive proposed solutions from businesses
through Nov. 20. After that, the governments
will work with the companies for 16
weeks to hone the solution to meet their
needs, although there is no guarantee of a
contract award at the end.
To determine the projects bestsuited
for STIR, Catherine Tkachyk,
Cuyahoga County chief innovation and
performance officer, and Matt Hrubey,
performance consultant at the county’s
Office of Innovation and Performance,
met with staff from county departments
and agencies and evaluated their pitches
based on several criteria: timing, cost and
needs vs. wants.
The question they wanted to answer,
Hrubey said, was, “what are the best options
for Cuyahoga County overall to
show improvement?”
For example, the Delinquent Tax Outreach
Unit wanted a way to automate
outreach efforts. When residents don’t pay
their property taxes on time, “they get penalties,
fees and they all add up and eventually
lead to … foreclosure,” Tkachyk said.
That’s a situation prime for artificial
intelligence and machine learning technology
that can identify trends and what
prompts people to pay on time. With that
information, the department can predict
when people may miss a payment and
alert them before it happens, she added.
The Division of Children and Family
Services is also looking to automation for
efficiency. Case workers spend hours in
their cars and then have to manually enter
that time each month into reports to get
reimbursed for mileage. An ideal solution
would automatically track caseworkers’
mileage using their smartphones and allow
for notes about why, for example, they
didn’t take the most direct route to a location,
Tkachyk said.
The Office of Early Childhood wants
an automated solution to handle key management
functions of the county’s Universal
Pre-Kindergarten program. A single
platform would allow the office to eliminate
paper, communicate with schools and
parents electronically, capture the data
that’s coming in and use it in a functional
way – namely, creating visualizations.
For those three challenges, Tkachyk
said solutions likely already exist. She’s
hoping STIR can help the county determine
the best one.
“[STIR] allows us to be involved in design
and share a little bit of what the intricacies
are of our county and what works
for us,” she said. “Sometimes what’s off
the shelf, especially if it’s made for large
organizations, they don’t always work.”
The development department, for example,
wants a more specialized digital
solution to make business decision-makers
aware of land and buildings available
for business use. A tool exists for residential
properties, but not commercial,
Hrubey said.
“We know where the information is in
a lot of cases, where we have it, but how to get it in one location and how to do that in a way that’s useful,
that’s what we’re hoping to get through our … partnership and
the startup,” Tkachyk said.
The county’s two other challenges are related to law enforcement.
The sheriff’s department hopes to digitize the process by
which employees request shifts and time off—a task they must
now do by paper and submit in person. The department also
wants to improve tracking of visitors and others coming and going
from Cuyahoga County Jail. Currently, visitors get a printout
that identifies them as such, but there’s no way to guarantee that
they have left when they were supposed to.
“A number of these challenges are really related to moving
from [a] very cumbersome process to more streamlined processes
and using technology to then enhance the streamlined process,”
Tkachyk said. We want to “spend more time on the front-end
service of actually serving our residents instead of spending a lot
of our efforts doing the paperwork, doing the backend work.”
Another goal behind participating in STIR is to get employees
interested in solving problems and conducting county business in
new ways. “With this program, I think we’re also hoping to engage
some of the [staff’s] creativity,” she said. “They can be part
of the solution.”
Once the proposals are in next month, the county will handle
them through the standard procurement process, Hrubey said.
The companies’ residency will start at the end of January.
The STIR program began in San Francisco in 2014 and now
includes city, county, regional government and state participants
from across North America. One successful civic solution to
come out of the program is Binti, an application that streamlines
the process for becoming a foster parent. It saves San Francisco
Human Services Agency workers 20 percent to 40 percent of their
time and increases the foster system’s capacity by 300 percent.
Other cities and challenges participating in the 2019 STIR
program include:
- Takoma Park, Maryland, which is looking to identify and
connect residents with workforce programs and resources.
- Carlsbad, California, which wants an integrated solution to
feed city right-of-way data directly into the Waze for Cities
program to improve communication of traffic information to
residents.
- Chula Vista, California, which seeks a way
to improve connectivity for first responders’
drone operations.
This article originally appeared in the March 2020 issue of Security Today.