New York Needs Remedial Education in Civic Tech

Mayor Adams promised New Yorkers he would be the city’s most tech-savvy mayor, but his decision to build a MyCity portal tipped off civic technologists early that supposed tech savviness doesn’t necessarily translate into tech capability. MyCity aims to put all City services in a single place, with a single login — an admirable vision of a future that never will, and never can be, given the reality of the City’s current technical capabilities. Not only does Adams’ plan trap the city’s few technical resources in a technical fantasy land, it detracts from solving the most pressing technical problems for New Yorkers. Relatively, it’s far less important — and far less worth the candle — to unite all City platforms under one roof than to ensure that our existing systems just work.

To start, MyCity is built using SalesForce, which requires a licensing fee. But that’s just the start. When MyCity launched in March 2023, it was already six months late, and had paid out $17 million in vendor contracts. What’s been produced for that amount appears to be a childcare screener and links to existing sites. Even what looks like success has led to failure; MyCity provides easy access for preschool enrollment on the front end, but leaves the back-end process untouched, overwhelming the City with applications and delaying the process up to 30 days.  

Experience teaches a different way forward. I am both a civic technologist and, for the last 15 years, the parent of New York City public school students. As a civic technologist, I know the City should begin by solving New Yorker’s most pressing problems. For me — along with a good percentage of the parents of the city’s 1.1 million public school students — the agency I interact with the most frequently is the Department of Education, so let’s use the DOE as an example. 

The DOE’s sites crash so routinely (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023) that it’s shocking when things work. Over the last decade and a half, the DOE has bounced from one tech failure to another, often putting children at risk. The crashes on this year’s this-is-not-a-snow-day-it’s-a-remote-learning-day were par for the course. Time and again, the DOE promises technology it does not have the capacity or capability to deliver.

Let us count the problems. First, each school is left to its own devices to develop a school community-wide rapid communications system. Brooklyn Tech, the largest school in the city, does not have such a system. When the school received a bomb threat in 2019, the building was evacuated with no communications to parents or students, stranding 6000 students outside on a freezing winter day, unsure whether they were about to be blown to pieces. As students at one of the city’s premier institutions, they stuck around for hours just in case classes restarted.

Similarly, when both Mark Twain Middle School and Murrow High School went into hard lockdowns last year, they had no way to communicate with parents — and chose not to inform students — leaving desperate students texting parents from behind locked doors while simultaneously using the Citizen app to determine if there were active shooters in the building.

Building effective tech tools in New York is not trivial. The DOE is the largest and most complex system of its kind, a descriptor that also applies to most New York agencies and departments. In technology, size matters: More users means more site functionality, more user load and more complexity. 

There are root causes at work here. The technical and systems problems facing the City are multilayered and mired in bureaucracy, beginning with procurement. Procurement in the City is a laborious affair. Paradoxically, government rules aimed at ensuring integrity and fairness often fail to do just that, while simultaneously making the process so onerous that only vendors who can afford staff dedicated to responding to government RFPs even qualify. 

The City won’t typically consider vendors who haven’t worked with a municipality before — they want large, stable vendors, not fly-by-night shops, which makes sense in a pre-internet world, but is not aligned with how the tech sector works today. Even if a vendor makes it through the qualification process, smaller shops’ proposals can be eliminated on a technicality — a source inside the City shared they once had to eliminate a great proposal because the font was wrong.

The process for purchasing technology is particularly complicated. First, City officials “gather requirements,” the first step in building technology in a waterfall process, long abandoned for agility in the private sector, but still alive and well in government. Requirements gathering ostensibly tells the City what problem the technology should solve. Often this process takes up to a year, at which point the problems have changed and requirements need to be gathered again. Or, the City moves ahead with a contract that solves yesterday’s problems. 

Too often, the people making technical purchasing decisions don’t understand what they are buying. To the government, buying a gross of paperclips is the same as buying a communications system for the DOE. But technology is not the same as office supplies. When you buy a paperclip, it’s a single-use item with a known function. When you buy a tech system, you are buying the thinking that goes into the system’s development. If you don’t have the necessary technical understanding, you might just as easily buy lazy, sloppy thinking (see: systems that crash or lag, and don’t work the way users do) as innovative, usable solutions. Buying ideas as though they are paperclips can only lead to wasted money and failure.

This leaves the City a sitting duck when it comes to unscrupulous tech vendors, the traveling hucksters of the procurement world. (Can I interest you in some Blockchain? Chatbot? How about some AI?) Because local, state and federal governments tend to have limited internal tech capacity and knowledge, there are too few people to constructively advise leadership or put a stop to unwise procurements. Purchasing decisions often amount to an agreement with vendors to profit from the City’s limited tech capacity and knowledge. 

Instead of throwing money in the circular file, rinse and repeat, the City could use the same money to hire internal tech talent — workers who are more available, interested and affordable now than technologists used to be — which would be a first step to lifting agencies out of their individual technical quagmires.

But procurement is only the first hurdle. Tackling enormous technical challenges requires breaking them down into solvable pieces. Looking at the DOE as a parent, I know that there are different systems for grades, pre-school enrollment, high school enrollment, online learning and parent communications, and none of them seem to work optimally on their own terms. 

Instead of spending years trying to squash all of the City’s processes into MyCity, the mayor could spin out smaller projects that make a real difference in New Yorkers’ lives. How about a six-month project to build a system-wide DOE communications system that better empowers the DOE to rapidly communicate with select audiences? Or a three-month project to assess why every DOE system falls over when a large number of people all need to access the system at the same time, and pick a solution? Digitizing a broken process gets you a digitized broken process. If you only digitize the entrance, people will still get backed up in the hallway. By digging deeply into discrete problems, the City can begin to solve problems in a meaningful way, providing a solid foundation for future solutions. 

Fixing these smaller problems would allow the City to tackle deeper issues at the same time. Working with the Government Performance Lab, Seattle consolidated 200 homeless service contracts into five vendors, and stopped renewing contracts based on compliance. Instead, the City required vendors to collect standardized, real-time metrics on the outcomes of their services. Not how many beds in shelters are full, but how many people experiencing homelessness now have the keys to a home? Building on this success, Seattle is now preparing to overhaul the entire city’s procurement process. 

Not only would building smaller solutions allow the DOE to produce functional products on a timeline in which we all still inhabit the planet, but this approach would allow the City to grow its tech capacity incrementally, ensuring that each system has a product owner and City employees who are capable of making changes to it without a costly change order. This is the structure the City must work towards in order to build a more responsive government that meets people’s needs today. 

In the de Blasio administration, New York City’s Office of Economic Opportunity attempted their own procurement reform. It failed, as initial procurement reform efforts often do. But when it comes to technology and systems change, failure is the first step to success. The problem is that the wrong people are failing, and no one is learning from those failures. The City can continue to pay tech vendors to keep failing, or could use the same funds to invest in tech-savvy City employees who can pick themselves up, figure out what went wrong, and try again. 

Only then will the City begin to move toward solving the most pressing problems for all New Yorkers.