Digitization in Santa Monica makes life easier for citizens

Beachside living in LA
City of Santa Monica provides services to the 93,000 residents living in the beachside city in the county of Los Angeles. Made up of residential communities, commercial districts, and leisure venues, the city attracts around 250,000 tourists, shoppers, and employees per day.

Digitizing paper-based system
When CIO, Joseph Cevetello, joined City of Santa Monica in 2017, he launched a strategic plan to make it easier for citizens to access services, and to digitize the workflows that make them happen. The ‘Digital City Hall’ aimed to remove manual processes, align services, and improve the constituent experience.

The 311 website experience, in particular, needed to be modernized.  When a citizen made a request to fix a pothole, for example, the public works department would close the request before manually logging a new request in another system and processing the workflow. The citizen was left with no visibility and this process lacked scalability.

A platform for success
City of Santa Monica partnered with ServiceNow to roll out IT Service Management in 2018. In 2020, the team built a new web portal and mobile app to provide a communication platform and knowledge base for 311 services. Since launching in March of this year, the City of Santa Monica App has received 5,636 requests, and is completing, on average, 150 cases every day - over 850 per week.

Supporting citizens
As well as providing a one-stop-shop to keep citizens updated on events happening in the city, users can also search for information and request support, making it a lifeline for the city’s residents. The City of Santa Monica App has handled requests from citizens experiencing homelessness, allowing the human services division to put them in touch with available housing programs. Shortly after deployment, it received 19 requests for rent control, and 45 calls to the consumer protection division from citizens looking for information on safe and equitable housing.

Adapting to changing expectations
The city’s adoption of a more flexible working model has had a significant impact on employee wellbeing, lessening the need for long commutes for many staff and allowing any staff member who chooses to work remotely to do so as effectively as onsite. “Our remote working program went from five people working remotely to 800 in just 36 hours,” says Joseph. “This was because of all the planning we had done to support a secure, mobile, digital experience through platforms like ServiceNow. Any initial worries we had about staff not being productive if they weren’t in the office were rapidly banished.” In fact, remote working has been so successful the organization is empowering workers to choose how much time they spend working in the office in the future.

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