As that question surfaces more frequently, internal service teams — and digital service teams (DSTs), a specialized subset — are one answer. The Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation released a guide earlier this month calling DSTs central to the work for their ability to integrate technology, service delivery, and expertise drawn from resident experience.
In Louisville, Ky.; Baltimore; and Des Moines, Iowa, successful modernizations hinged on internal teams that expanded their technical expertise and treated the endeavors less as deployments and more as long-term operational work. Each built some version of internal capacity around that idea.
BUILDING TEAMS BEFORE TECHNOLOGY
Louisville’s modernization story essentially starts with people.
It began, CIO Chris Seidt said, around 2012 with investments in smart-city efforts and a shift toward enterprise modernization — and bringing in expertise that could “help to develop out what we need to function in the 21st century.”
“Some people think technology on its own can be a problem solver,” Greenberg said. “That’s not the case. It’s good technology with great people managing the technology.”
The city expanded its teams in part by bringing people from the private sector on board, then paired them with IT — and an enterprise resource planning system from Workday that was customized to fit city operations rather than deployed out of the box.
“It takes some customization, and it takes real strength of management,” Greenberg said.
Louisville staff have brought free public Wi-Fi to all parks and have used tech to support requests for city records. This year, plans are to redesign service delivery, making the experience, “from reporting a broken trash can lid to a pothole to tall grass,” Seidt said, easier for residents to request.
GOVERNMENT AS ITS OWN CONSULTANT
Baltimore approached internal capacity through CityStat, its “performance and accountability program,” per the mayor’s website. The city’s Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) built a structure around signals, service design and analytics.
CitiStat is on the front end monitoring agency performance and surfacing service issues, OPI Executive Director Dartanion Swift-Williams said, before any problems move to an Innovation Lab focused on “process improvement or service improvement” and “[user experience] UX for digital products.”
For example, if parking enforcement had a problem, the lab would examine “the delivery of the service as well as the tools that are used to provide that service.”
To Swift-Williams, that structure only works if the city has the internal technical capacity and expertise to support it — rather than relying solely on outside vendors.
Consultants, he said, often “play a facilitation role in understanding the problems and what the solution should be. Why not bring that in-house and under a model such as ours that serves as an internal consultancy?” In Baltimore’s case, it has aggregated much of that knowledge under OPI.
That philosophy can be seen in the projects completed — including work to resolve 311 customer service and communications issues. Here, leaders formed a “tiger team” from innovation office, IT and agency staff to pinpoint where communication was breaking down and service processes were failing.
It showed Baltimore’s broader strategy: relying on internal teams with operational knowledge of how services actually move through the government, rather than treating an issue as a technical problem for an outside vendor.
Diversity of expertise — beyond engineers and analysts — matters, Swift-Williams said.
“You have to have an understanding and appreciation for operations,” he said. “A lot of times people just lean in straight into tech, but there are processes, there are workflows, there are handoffs, there are people involved.”
FROM INTERNAL CAPACITY, A DIGITAL TWIN
Des Moines activated its internal capacity through GIS.
The city already had an established team supporting public safety and city operations when a project emerged requiring 3D modeling work. Officials looked outside first — only to discover quotes from third parties were very expensive. The existing GIS staff, they realized, had computer-aided drafting and rendering skills, and internal experience that had not been fully used.
“We found that we could probably do it more efficiently and cheaper in-house for that specific project,” Deputy CIO Aaron Greiner said.
The decision led to something much larger. Des Moines’ GIS effort originally focused on creating standardized data sets, centralized mapping and regional support for 911 systems. Over time, the operation expanded into enterprise infrastructure. Now, Greiner said, GIS is “critical and core to pretty much everything the city itself does,” and integrates with permitting, licensing and asset management systems across departments.
Empowered by its staff, the city used lidar flights over downtown, internal staff expertise and refinement work to create a 3D environment officials describe as “the digital twin of the city.”
One example of its use involved development pressure around a protected Capitol view shed — a project that might block the view through Des Moines of the Iowa state Capitol dome. Officials modeled a proposed building using estimated dimensions to show how it would obstruct views and shift the conversation toward design changes.
Greiner also reinforced a point that came up repeatedly: internal systems require attention after implementation. Data integrations, he said, exemplify this. He pointed to data integration as one of the biggest pieces of that work, as application programming interfaces (APIs) linking GIS platforms and outside vendors are “constantly changing” through upgrades and updates. These integrations, he said, need continuous “care and feeding.”
City staff continually maintain integrations to keep them “active, current, secure,” while monitoring how systems interact across departments and vendors. In practice, Greiner said, they are not simply “plug and play” systems but environments that require ongoing internal attention — which is why having in-house expertise is vital.
The city’s GIS staff growth has reflected that reality, expanding from two people and a manager into a larger operation and getting trained in SQL work, development tools, and advanced techniques.
VENDORS STILL BELONG
Despite their emphasis on internal staffing and upskilling, none of the cities argued for abandoning vendors entirely.
“We will never have the resources to generate proprietary new technology ourselves,” Greenberg said of Louisville. Instead, officials look for technology already on the market that can support priorities like public safety, permitting and resident services while making sure internal teams can manage implementation and customization.
From energy to parking to health services, cities touch nearly every domain imaginable, Baltimore’s Swift-Williams said, and expertise does not naturally live under one roof.
And in Des Moines, officials framed the decision operationally: identify the need, evaluate whether the tools and skills exist internally, and determine whether the work belongs in City Hall or outside it.
