With a new mayor coming, Philly OIT dropped a new strategic plan focused on these 5 issues

With the new year and a new mayor coming soon, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) is preparing to hit the ground running in January.

OIT released the “Strategic Plan for the Office of Innovation and Technology 2024-2025” last week to organize its goals for the coming year and prepare for the start of Cherelle Parker’s administration.

The office is in charge of managing the City’s tech infrastructure and helping other government departments implement technology, as well as supporting tech-related initiatives that benefit residents, such as digital equity programs.

“The goal was to look at not only the outstanding gaps that we see in IT for our organization, but also for the city — but also support all of those departments that have their own initiatives, outline what we feel is important and how we can support them,” Sandra Carter, interim chief information officer, told Technical.ly. “But also, to just publish and make folks aware of what good the city is doing in the area of IT.”

It has been over four years since OIT released its last strategic plan in 2019, and a lot has changed since then, said Andrew Buss, deputy chief information officer.

Programs such as the Smart Cities initiative and the digital services team were still young in 2019. That plan also incorporated more public input and was more focused on public-facing technology.

The new plan relied on internal feedback from a survey sent out to OIT staff, Buss said. This survey identified challenges the department faces and formed the five focus points of the plan:

• Security and data protection
• Digital equity and resident services
• Modernization and efficiency
• Foundational infrastructure and processes
• Technology community partnerships and communication

Read the plan

“This time around, since we have matured a lot of that work, we really wanted to step back and focus on some of the more internal challenges that we have,” Buss said, “focusing on our primary operational challenges, knowing that those are what we have to do to keep our strong foundation of supporting the departments, while we’re also doing this public-facing and technology and innovation work.”

Examples of internal work include expanding capacity for digital storage and preparing to modernize technology systems within the City, Carter said. However, Buss noted, the report is not an exhaustive list of everything the department plans to accomplish.

“For me, I really want to focus on security and technical debt,” Carter said. “I know it’s not shiny, it’s not. It’s not a fun thing. But to me, it’s something that’s foundational, and it’s extremely important to make sure that we provide security over city data and city systems.”

Moving into 2024, Buss said he expects to continue digital equity work in preparation for the federal funding opportunities that are coming. With the new administration, Buss also expects some City departments to change their processes. OIT can help them do that.

The goals that OIT highlighted in the plan fit into what the department knows so far about Parker’s goals, Carter said, specifically the mayor-elect’s “safer, cleaner, greener with economic opportunity for all” vision — “whether it’s something that we’re doing in bolstering our capacity and our computability but also supporting the departments, the streets department, L&I, health and public safety, and even the Mayor’s Office,” Carter said.

OIT leaders plan to speak with Parker and her transition team to explain the work they’ve been doing with both internal- and external-facing departments. Carter hopes this plan will be an “easy read” for Parker’s team to help catch them up on OIT’s work.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.