The City of Los Angeles and experts highlighted several strategic hurdles to overcome to expand smart city digital service capabilities by 2028. The City is committed to continuously improving the digital user experience and customer mobility services. The identified difficulties include ①Improvement of user experience (UX) across LA digital services ②Accessibility and awareness of LA digital services ③Personal information and ethical issues.
Ted Ross, City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency General Manager and Chief Information Officer, said, “In the City of Los Angeles, technology is helping to manage traffic, plan communities, engage voters, and improve traffic through the coordination of existing and new smart city technologies. It is fundamental to fulfilling the function of protecting residents,” he said.
Ted added that technology enables the City of Los Angeles to efficiently and ethically improve the quality of life for residents, businesses and other stakeholders. Urban governance ensures that all communities and businesses have access to the Internet. This includes distributing more than 5,000 computers to families in need in the City of Los Angeles. However, some difficulties have emerged, such as limited public access to the use of new technologies such as blockchain and robotic process automation.
Procurement and contracting difficulties slow IT adoption and limit access to new technologies. Because there is no single centralized user ID and password to access multiple City of Los Angeles digital services, the public has to manipulate multiple digital IDs.
The city has different stages of providing digital services and experiences to customers, which has resulted in an unfair digital experience for the general population during natural disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The problem is that LA digital services are not uniformly available to the public because LA digital services function differently in a few cities, and the wide range of digital services provided by the city is insufficient to provide detailed customer information in a timely manner.
The City of Los Angeles also experienced a lack of public understanding of several innovative digital services that were accessible for free. The digital service also has limited access to public places, including bus stops, trails and tourist attractions.
As people become digitized, privacy concerns, data breaches, and other concerns are also increasing skepticism about digital technologies. As a government heavily dependent on technology, the City of Los Angeles recognizes the importance of innovative and ethical digital services.
As a solution to these challenges, the City of Los Angeles sought to create a digital public service toolkit that would enable city departments to improve the professionalism and digital experience of voters. The Los Angeles Digital Code of Ethics contains technical guidelines that address public concerns, including online privacy protection, unethical use of developed technologies such as facial recognition, and equal access to digital services for the City of Los Angeles.
These efforts also include designing and deploying robotic process automation (RPA) as a new technology for intelligent document processing that starts with data entry for supplier invoices and extends to other activities in the city. The city aims to create and use blockchain as a new technology for smart contracts and small business registrations in 2022-2023 to create an innovative and secure recordkeeping system.