South Bend + Long Beach

A cohort of South Bend’s I&T Team visited Long Beach’s TID to talk low code, smart cities, CX + more!

In 2024, our team is intentionally building deep collaborative relationships with other cities who use similar tech solutions, are undertaking similar projects, and have similar team structures! Part of this relationship building and professional development is our site visit approach. Read here to learn more about it.

South Bend I&T sent 6 representatives across Civic Innovation, Enterprise Services & Software, Customer Service & Success, and DIgital Services

In late June, we visited Long Beach, California’s Technology and Innovation Department (TID). We crafted a two-day schedule on shared topics of interest: Smart City Planning, recruitment and culture, IT project management, civic user testing, kiosk procurement, and low code strategies.

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was the tour of Long Beach’s Permitting Center and Utility Payment Center. South Bend is opening a new City Hall in 2025. Learning as much as we can from other cities on their “one stop shop” customer-facing operations, layouts, and underlying technology is essential to our success.

Just walking around, you could tell a lot of planning and thought went into Long Beach City Hall!

We got a lot of lessons learned from the Permitting Center managers on scheduling, accessibility, and continuous improvement.

Other site visit highlights:

• South Bend got a lot out of learning from Long Beach’s impressive Smart City project portfolio. In particular, we are interested in replicaitng the Pitch Long Beach model to help us engage with tech vendors more efficiently and strategically across departments.
• Both of our cities are in the early stages of procuring kiosks, but with different focuses. It was interesting to learn from one another’s respective goals and business requirements. This is a topic we’ll have to stay in touch on.
• South Bend showcased our IT project management/change management routines, templates, and structures. Starting in 2020, I&T developed a small, but mighty PMO (PMO = project management office) that has helped us enormously as we’ve undertaken large, complex technology modernizations.
• Both teams shared out on our civic user testing/research models (See here to read out South Bend’s SB UX program and see this report to learn about Long Beach’s approach). Our repsective scopes and processes are different and there was a lot to learn from one another!
• Long Beach’s low code team is spectacular! I&T’s Digital Service’s team is building our low code strategy now and seeing some of TID’s products and underlying governance gave us lots of ideas to activate in South Bend.

The TID team was an excellent host. They invited us to their Department’s 80’s themed ice cream social and were so generous with their time. The two full days were invaluable. We are confident that the site visit will result in some lasting collaboration between our two Departments!

California is beautiful, but we did spend most of our time in conference rooms!

Thanks for your hospitality, Lea and team!

Thank you to Lea Eriksen, Behrang Abadi, Ryan Kurtzman, Jonathan Williams-Kinsel, Vanessa Llanes, Brett Yakus and the whole Long Beach TID team for digging into these collaborative topics will us and showcasing your city. We hope this is the beginning of a lasting cross-city learning relationship!

In February we visited Syracuse, NY for a data-focused site visit. Our friends from the Syracuse team wrote about their time with us. Read their blog post here.