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3: Improving Public Services in Seattle with Technology
This section examines the opportunities and challenges in improving public sector service delivery by using digital technology. As resident expectations of government continue to evolve, we find that are The private sector is adept at using digital technology to provide an effective customer experience across a variety of goods and services. Residents expect, and deserve, to get a similar level of service provision from the public sector.
The public sector faces constraints and challenges in service delivery.
Traditionally, the public sector is budget-constrained and has to deliver services under limited resources. In turn, insufficient resourcing is a key reason for sub-optimal performance in the public sector, including delays, lowquality, and non-responsiveness. Poor service provision, in turn, disproportionately affects underresourced socioeconomic groups. 27 For example, many states in the US have implemented online platforms for the delivery of social services like Medicare and SNAP. But the user experience leaves much to be desired because of convoluted forms, use of old technology and lack of access via mobile devices. many opportunities for the City to build on its existing use of technology, including by following the lead of peer
cities and governments. Disadvantaged residents often face large opportunity costs in accessing such resources and benefits, for example due to financial or time constraints.
At the same time, the private sector consistently raises consumer expectations.
The private sector has been able to harness technological advances to open new frontiers in delivering goods and services. Technology has transformed a wide range of daily activities, from grocery shopping to consumer credit scoring. This transformation of the consumer experience places pressure on public services, as residents come to expect similar levels of quality. Public opinion surveys illustrate this deficiency, with consistently lower satisfaction scores for public sector services in the public opinion surveys we analyzed. 28,29 The result of such a recent McKinsey study on customer satisfaction for select services in the US is presented in Figure 3.1. 30
Figure 3.1: US customer satisfaction across services.
Federal Government State Government Cable TV Electric utility Airline Mobile phone Car insurance Credit Card Bank or Creidt Union E-Commerce site Grocery Store 5.6 6.2 6.9 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.6 7.7 8.1 8.2 8.3
0 5
10 Source: McKinsey (2017)
Drilling down further, there is heterogeneity in customer experience across different types of government services. 31 Such heterogeneity means that there are opportunities to target improvements and innovations towards specific services.
These challenges will grow for cities like Seattle.
Seattle is at the forefront of technological innovation. For example, The public sector needs to embrace digital technologies if it is to compete with customer satisfaction from the private sector in service delivery. These technologies improve service delivery by providing a higher quality product/service or a similar quality product at a lower cost. 33 Both allow human (for example by reducing routine tasks) or financial resources Amazon launched its first ‘Go’ stores in the city in 2018. There are no cashiers in these stores and consumers’ purchases are automatically charged to their Amazon accounts. This seamless experience has opened a new frontier in customerexperience. During our field visit, we learned that the Seattle Center is redeveloping its Arena. The new Arena will feature automated parking lanes and ticket counters to create an efficient parking experience. 32 Once complete, residents will likely compare the Arena’s customer experience with other services provided by the City, which is likely to raise their expectations for the city’s service provision. We believe that expectations from the public will only increase in the future, as private sector innovations continually improve user experiences. As customers experience continually improves with the private sector, it is reasonable to expect that there will be increasing pressure on the public
Digital technologies are an opportunity for Government to improve service delivery
sector to improve its services. (through reduced costs) to be reallocated within the organization or to another sector. Such reallocations can also lead to gains that will spill over to other sectors. Technologies can improve the speed and quality of information processing in public sector settings. This improvement can substantially reduce the time devoted to routine tasks,
allowing employees to focus more on tasks requiring cognitive attention and interpersonal contact. Technology will also improve monitoring and accountability. Governments struggle to enforce uniform standards due to limitations in resources. 34 Fire inspection is a case in point, given the resource intensity The Seattle city government has made promising advances in the use of digital technologies for service provision. We also found heterogeneity in the adoption of technologies across city departments, which presents an opportunity for process improvement. This section reviews major recent technological interventions in the City.
Seattle City Light
The Advanced Metering Initiative (AMI) by City Light is a recent significant technological intervention in the City through the installation of Smart meters, a crucial component of Smart grids. Smart grids are efficient electricity grids that use technological devices like smart meters, smart appliances and energy-efficient resources to reduce consumption and optimize peak load. The implementation of smart meters will lead to substantial cost savings, as has been shown in other jurisdictions such as the European Union. 36 The implementation of this project is reviewed in detail in Box 3.1. required to consistently monitor buildings and public spaces. City governments like New Orleans that have implemented AI-assisted fire inspection utilize predictive models based on historical data and defined characteristics to better assess risks and direct their preventive activities and
The City can build on its existing useof digital technologies
inspections accordingly. 35
Department of Transportation
The Department of Transportation (SDOT) has deployed traffic cameras and sensors across the city under the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). 37 The Transportation Operations Center processes this data to provide real-time inputs to residents. Law enforcement officers and maintenance crews also use this information to plan activities and support decision-making. The ITS has deployed bike detection sensors at traffic intersections, which communicate with traffic signals to optimize trips for cyclists. 38 SDOT has also implemented automated traffic signaling, which responds to traffic disruptions. Automated signal timing has been particularly effective in clearing traffic after rail crossings or bridge openings. 39
The current strategic plan of ITS expires in 2020, which represents an opportunity to continue to identify and implement additional technologies to improve its services.
Smart sensors under the Array of Things
A number of City departments have taken part in a project to deploy sensors across the city to measure rain, wind speed, air quality, and pedestrian traffic among other data. 40 This data has the potential to support decision making on issues such as flooding, pollution, and traffic management. The data is collected and processed by the University of Washington through a partnership with the City. The City Seattle can learn from the successful application of digital technologies by other governments. This section summarizes some such successful applications that Seattle can consider.
Unified 311 call center with chatbot support
An in-person visit, phone call, or an email are the usual first points of contact between residents and a public office. Assigning a dedicated person or team to attend to all inquiries can drain resources and is often too expensive for many public organizations. Chatbots offer standardized responses to a wide variety of queries, in real-time at any time of the day, and are being increasingly adopted by governments. For example, the United Kingdom is experimenting with chatbots for nonemergency health and housing services and queries. 41 Similarly, many American governments like the State of North Carolina and the City of Mesa, Arizona have rolled out chatbots. 42 should evaluate the effectiveness of the project and consider expanding the project if it is judged to have been successful.
Many opportunities to improve services remain.
These are promising examples of technology adoption, and we believe Seattle can do more to thoughtfully identify, pilot, and scale digital technologies. With the right supporting framework, Seattle can further improve
Learning from Seattle’s peers’ experiences with technology
resident services with technology. Chatbots are more effective if the city unifies resident queries under a single system, such as the 311 system in New York City. A unified call system for addressing residents’ grievances has many advantages. For example, the Mayor’s office can have a high-level view of what residents’ concerns are, and 311 can act as a platform to facilitate inter-departmental communication. A single system also allows for easier benchmarking of performance standards. The NYC 311 routinely evaluates its performance visà-vis other private service providers. More than one hundred cities across the US have shifted to a unified 311 service. 43 We note that a shift to a unified system requires significant interdepartmental coordination and is time consuming. As such, chatbots can be implemented even before a centralized system is in place, which offers an opportunity for a quick win.
Record Searching and DecisionMaking Support
Government employees spend a lot of time finding relevant precedents and assessing the legality of a process. While many government offices already use some forms of advanced search and decision-making tools, AI is increasingly used to improve effectiveness in these fields and initial results are promising. The US Patent and Trademark Office is currently working on developing an advanced search tool that uses machine learning algorithms. 44 This innovation is an example of the humanmachine pairing we expect will increase in many workplaces. Through enhanced searches, officials can then save time from routine tasks and concentrate on more cognitively demanding ones, such as making a recommendation to accept an innovation for patent review. Many Government offices are also experimenting with AI tools for generating reports and answers. For example, Japan is experimenting with Digital technologies offer opportunities, but also create unique challenges to governance and accountability.
Racial Bias
Digital technologies raise issues of racial bias, equity and accountability. Research has documented racial bias embedded in policing and criminal justice algorithms in the US, resulting from reliance on historical data sets, AI to draft policies and responses for Parliamentarians. 45 These technologies can automate parts of routine work, thereby allowing employees to improve the quality of their output and overall productivity.
Identifying critical risks such as fire hazards, and road safety bottlenecks
Cities are reporting promising results after using predictive algorithms for identifying fire hazards. 46 Fire departments traditionally organize inspections through random selection based on historical risk projections (and limited resources). However, such methods many times fail to identify the most critical buildings or areas at risk. AI-enabled software analyzes reams of data through various algorithms to predict critical risks. The New Orleans and Atlanta fire departments have implemented such software, making fire inspections as much as two and a half times more efficient at identifying high-risk properties. 47 Governments can use similar technology to predict forest fires, road safety bottlenecks,
Managing the unique challenges of technology adoption
and other risks. which have been shown to exhibit racial bias. 48,49 A recent federal study found that false positives in facial recognition algorithms in the US for minority populations are orders of magnitude higher than that of Caucasians. 50
The city should evaluate these risks as it considers any application of AI or ML to city services, and avoid high-risk technologies such as facial recognition.
Privacy
The efficiency of data-driven technologies is highly dependent on the quality of the data set inputs. However, the collection of this data can put at risk long-held notions of privacy and ethics. For example, in 2019 it was revealed that technology companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft had been collecting private conversations to improve their AI’s natural language capabilities, prompting a global regulatory and public backlash. 51,52
The Seattle city government is keenly aware of the importance of privacy, as one of the first city governments to establish a data protection and privacy framework. 53 The city conducts Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) of new technologies by assessing the privacy risks of projects and ways to mitigate them. We found that the city had performed a PIA on most of its technology projects, which is an important foundation for future technology adoption. 54
Accountability
Government accountability requires that decision-making channels are transparent and open to public review. However, when governments procure services from the private sector to access the latest technologies, they are often limited in their ability to hold the technologies or companies to account. Such lack of transparency arises because companies develop proprietary algorithms, leading to the notion that many AI or ML goods and services are a ‘black-box’. 55 Governments need to have the capacity to assess and monitor technological innovations created by the private sector, particularly because software and other products are procured with taxpayer funding. In some crucial areas, government may have to develop in-house solutions, and must subsequently develop in-house capabilities for all these services. Accountability and transparency, as such, are significant challenges for the public sector as technologies become increasingly sophisticated.
Impact on employment
As digital technologies impact the workforce, governments will have to mitigate labor impacts. For example, Seattle City Light had organized paid retraining for meter readers when they implemented the Advanced Metering Initiative (see Box 3.1). Similarly, the Paris subway worked closely with their drivers and unions for many years before one of their lines was automated. The management reached out to employees directly and through their unions. Management explained the needs and benefits of automation and worked out an acceptable re-deployment plan. This process took almost two years, which shows that such mitigation plans will be careful, painstaking work. Automation of the line started only three years later, giving both sides more time to come to a workable agreement. 56
As these examples show, technology adoption in public services necessarily means incorporating the municipal workforce in any rollout.
Box 3.1: Advanced Metering Initiative (AMI) in Seattle City Light
The rollout of advanced meters in Seattle City Light is an excellent example of a successful implementation of digital technology. Seattle City Light started the installation of smart meters in new residential and small commercial construction projects in the summer of 2017. The project had significant workforce implications, with forty-five Meter Reader jobs set to be automated and replaced. City Light committed not to lay off any workers and developed a redeployment plan by reaching out to workers to identify future job aspirations. They then worked with Seattle College to create a 12-week training program for the employees, paid for by City Light, which was conducted during regular work hours at full pay. In total, thirty-three Meter Readers moved to new jobs, while the remaining Readers are still deployed for customers who opted out of the automated meters and for instances of meter failures. City Light worked carefully to minimize challenges during the rollout by bringing all stakeholders on board early in the process. Customers were informed about the rollout through a dedicated web page and other communications channels. 57 The Privacy Impact Assessment of the project was done well ahead of the rollout. 58,59 They trained existing staff for using smart meters and retrained the affected employees. We note that the rollout could have been thissuccessful because only forty-five jobs were impacted, and recognize that a retraining and job placement effort for a larger group will be more resource intensive. Nevertheless, City Light’s rollout of advanced meters is a promising example of successful technology implementation and holds valuable lessons for future initiatives.
