For this densely populated, large American city to provide millions of residents the ability to reach out and interact with city services with live support was truly a massive and forward-thinking undertaking. That’s why the city’s previous implementation of a live city-services hotline, accessible by dialing 311, was celebrated by city administrators around the nation and beyond.
But in this fast-paced city, yesterday’s cutting-edge is today’s out-of-date. And attracting the world’s best from a new generation of tech workers, digital natives and high value millennial residents is the lifeblood of a global metropolis. Extending the 311 service to a mobile app wasn’t so much a luxury—as an absolute requirement. The residents wanted to use an app to report noise, potholes, and heavy traffic, get a quick fix when heat or hot water goes out, pay parking tickets and other bills, and engage in thousands of unique interactions with city’s 120 agencies, officers and organizations.
The problem was how to do this given the city’s desire to stick with all the advantages of using a robust mainframe. The landscape was littered with failed projects by cities that had undertaken total rewrites to such systems—with subsequent financial, reputational and political costs.
Thankfully, as a longtime user of Adabas, the city had a partner it could turn to in Software AG. CONNX provided a safer, faster, lower-cost and more secure way forward. CONNX brought digitalized 311 services to any platform—from Web to tablet to mobile— exceeding resident demands to have the city’s ear no matter the time or day.
The city’s leaders analyzed what other cities had tried and had no desire to break its amazing 311 hotline with Adabas and VSAM on the backend, and other powerful custom applications being used for services throughout the metropolis.
A lot of research led to a clear conclusion: CONNX was a better way to go. It would let the city keep its existing system advantages while offering totally modern iOS and Android apps giving residents zip code- and address-based, individual access to city services.
Best of all, setup and implementation promised to be fast, cheap and successful. “Our success rate on these sorts of projects really is 100 percent,” says Bierman. It was all proved true.
So did the popularity of app-based, e-government interactions. On a normal day, CONNX Web servers are bringing the city’s apps to the mainframe at a rate of thousands of connections an hour.
The system has already saved the city millions of dollars in both setup costs and now on an ongoing basis. Automating bill payment and other services adds force multipliers like real-time services, fewer errors and turn-around times, city employees avoiding the drudgery of menial data entry, and residents with a closer connection to the place they already love with a passion.
But what’s really special about what CONNX has brought to the city is what it promises for the future.
From smart infrastructure built on an IoT backbone, to real-time access to city cameras for traffic routing, the world’s cities are moving towards raw data access that depends on apps.
“If the city wants to implement a new service,” says Bierman, “It can take care of the CONNX part by writing a simple query of about a dozen lines—that it can finish testing in less than a day.” That means the city can go from idea to implementation in as little as a month, limited only by the bureaucracy of studying the impact of the new service.
And as the 311 app connections continue to rise with the success of the city’s e-government services, the only interaction it needs with Software AG is to add licenses and web servers—easily scaling to keep access speedy, costs predictable and low, and people smiling.
