The City of Philadelphia has established its very own Digital Services Team, which will be responsible for providing the surrounding communities with digital versions of the city’s public services. The Digital Services Team is comprised of the Content Strategy Team, the Digital Forms Team, and the User Experience (UX) Team that already exists. Within the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT), “Digital Services” will become a top focus thanks to the efforts of this group.
The group will develop digital services that will make it simpler for city residents and companies to communicate with city government officials. The most important digital access point for city information and services is located at phila.gov.
The team will employ human-centred design approaches in order to get a deeper understanding of the ways in which citizens interact with digital products, including the City’s website and other online services. They will consider the ease with which a tool may be utilised by the people for whom it was designed, the clarity with which the information can be understood, and the effectiveness with which a process can be improved.
The Digital Services Team has several responsibilities, including but not limited to the following: to represent the expertise and leadership of the UX and Content Strategy Teams; to build upon how residents and businesses access or engage with information and services in city government; to expand and maintain phila.gov, and to establish a Digital Services strategy across all levels of government. In addition, most of the services that are planned by the Digital Services Team are finished with the assistance of the Software Engineering Team that is part of OIT.
Moving forward, the Digital Services Team will continue to work on projects of this nature, in addition to a great number of other projects. The Digital Services programme will now report to the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) that will be hired, in addition to the development of a new team that will work on the initiative. Because of this, the design and development phases of product creation will be able to be coordinated more closely.
The city’s OIT is ready to continue developing high-quality, long-lasting digital products for the people living in Philadelphia as well as the businesses that call the city home because of the extensive knowledge it possesses in the areas of content strategy, user experience, and digital forms, and software engineering.
Before combining their efforts into a single unit, the UX, Content Strategy, and Digital Forms teams ought to first examine their previous accomplishments carefully. Some of the accomplishments from the previous year are: Developed content for the Vendor Payments application; Redesigned the Water Lien application so that city residents can access it anywhere; and Created Licenses and Inspection (L&I) Lookup Resources (li.phila.gov), which consolidated five of the Department of L&I’s public-facing applications into a single-entry point.
For the city’s main website, they have collaborated with departments in the writing, editing, and design of online material; consolidated eleven newly developed web pages for programmes and initiatives onto a single, easily navigable platform; and training classes for city employees were held on the phila.gov website.
In addition to establishing a digital form for taking salary tax refund petitions from non-residents and migrating over 70 digital forms to a new platform that is more secure; this enabled the secure delivery of over 15,000 entries.
