With more than 206,000 residents, Sioux Falls is the most populous city in South Dakota — and it’s a state focused on improving operations with technology. And while governments grapple with workforce challenges, there are practices that can improve workforce resilience. For Sioux Falls, technology plays a key role.
“We’re going to be focusing on digital experience of our workers now,” said Brian Sherman, who serves as the city’s chief technology officer. He explained that the city has spent recent years putting new systems in place and ensuring the infrastructure powering government operations works effectively. Now, the goal is evolving as the workforce grows to include ensuring people want to work on those systems — an aspect of modernization that Sherman said sometimes gets lost.
This is representative of a strategic shift for the city in recent years, Sioux Falls Department of Innovation and Technology Director Shawn Pritchett said. This transition, he said, helps the city deliver on its primary mission and function: ensuring the organization is safe, secure and efficient to support customer-facing divisions and organizations.
Looking ahead, Sioux Falls plans to implement artificial intelligence, but instead of focusing on the generative AI trend, Sherman said the city’s approach is to focus on the use cases he thinks could be most impactful for its government. This includes the use of AI to create something akin to an internal HR assistant, to assist city staff in requesting time off, for example.
“Our key focus, obviously, is AI technology, because it really has a possibility of transforming the organization,” Pritchett said.
As a mid-sized organization, Sherman said the city does not have the capacity to create its own large language model that might compete with the major names in the industry, but there is still a need for government AI implementations to be responsible — and that includes fiscal responsibility, too. The city must ensure, Sherman explained, that the tools it invests in will yield returns.
Pritchett serves Sioux Falls in the dual role of director of the Department of Innovation and Technology and as director of Finance. As he explained, this is influential because any project the city takes on related to new technology or innovation is going to require the support of the organization and its financial resources. Pritchett also underlined the value of relationships between city technology and finance teams.
After the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had an abundance of resources available to them for various reasons, including federal funding opportunities and economic strength. Today, Pritchett said that governments are at the end of that period, and AI may help address restraints in resources while improving the efficiency of existing services and operations.
At the heart of any AI work in Sioux Falls will be data governance, he said. This will be a key priority for the next year, and he said it translates not only into AI but into all city business operations, and privacy, too.
As AI advances, so does the need for effective security measures, Pritchett said. The city has established guardrails for employees outlining what they can and cannot do with AI technology. As an example, the use of AI platforms to create any digital images has been banned, unless approval is granted by the city communications department, he said.
One way the city delivers on its goals, Pritchett said, is by “not getting distracted by shiny objects outside of the city” — but focusing instead on what will most effectively impact the city and those it serves.
Security is another major priority. Sioux Falls has rebuilt its entire security program over the course of the last year, Pritchett said, and over the past several years, has moved to Microsoft 365 and implemented a new unified communication system.
The city's technology team is charged with managing and protecting privileged information of residents, and managing critical public assets to ensure there is no service disruption.
“We’ve really been investing in trying to make that a key priority, because it affects absolutely everything that we do,” said Pritchett.
Finally, Dakota State University’s Applied Research Lab is one of the “great assets and benefits” the city has, according to Pritchett. The city made a $10 million investment to support the lab’s creation because of its potential to diversify the city’s economy in a way that the community will benefit from, for what Pritchett said he believes will be decades to come.
