Accelerating Government

The Future Ready Awards, exclusively underwritten by Google Cloud, will recognize a total of 5 jurisdictions across this year’s Center for Digital Government Awards Programs including one county at the Digital Counties Survey Awards, one city during the Digital Cities Survey Awards, and three jurisdictions (city, county, and state) at the Government Experience Awards.

This year, the Future Ready winner selected as part of the Digital Counties Survey was Los Angeles County. LA County, who also took first place across the entire survey for counties, was selected as a Future Ready award winner because of their work to not only respond to the events of 2020 but to lay the foundation for 2021 and beyond through several new initiatives, including: Establishing a $10 million-dollar technology innovation fund for multidepartment programs. The development of an enterprise IT strategy for over 200 business units and IT professionals across 37 departments. Deploying a $20 million-dollar legacy technology modernization fund. Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning in new mission-critical social services including tackling homelessness.

The city of El Paso, Texas, deployed a community-centric website (epstrong.org) to provide centralized messaging and resources to residents, which became a critical foundation in its response and adaptation to COVID-19.

The Orange County Property Appraiser’s Office deployed a multimodal feedback collection system that consisted of chatbots, social media, kiosks and an AI-enabled cloud-based survey for field appraisers.

The state of Mississippi deployed a number of AI-enabled communication capabilities, including a chatbot named ‘Missi’ and Google Assistant skillsets, that allow citizens to quickly find the information they need through a simple text or voice query.

This year we’re recognizing the city of Lynchburg, Va., as a 2020 Future Ready Award Winner. A few highlights for how Lynchburg prepared for the future: Lynchburg aligned its IT strategic plan to the citywide master plan to ensure people, processes and technologies were focused on the same objectives. Lynchburg engaged collaboratively with the school district and state agencies on new applications and cloud infrastructure to increase overall resilience. Lynchburg is continuously adapting by identifying and utilizing emerging technologies to solve mission-critical problems. For example, it is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor rainfall and water levels to avoid flooding.