I had the privilege of joining several of my colleagues from around the country, along with ICMA and Esri staff, to discuss the future of government apps and the use of smart phones and tablets to gather and disseminate information to our customers.

I use the word customers and not citizens because I believe that as data becomes more omnipresent, we are not just interacting with our geographical boundary citizens, but anyone traveling, shopping, visiting, or just driving through our jurisdiction. Users of mobile data devices are not interested in how government has chosen to divide up their state or even divide up the responsibilities of government. The amount of data and the mobility of that data have created a new paradigm for local government data delivery. We no longer force feed the public by determining the timing of, or have staff making the decisions about, what data is conveyed. People want information immediately on topics they care about and not necessarily what we think they want.

Over the past few decades, I have observed many government organizations push data in the same fashion as we had previously, but with the new technology. We used fax machines, then phone systems, and early computer systems, etc., but the creation of the mobile application is a game changer for local governments. Information can now be transmitted to the end user based on a geographic focus of where they are in the world. What park is near me? Where is the closest Mexican restaurant? Which bank is nearby? What is the quality of the local school district? How much reinvestment has occurred in this neighborhood I’m driving through? What is happening at that vacant lot that I’m driving by?

The amount of data available to the world is greater than it’s been in human existence, and we have come to expect it will be delivered immediately. The challenge for application developers is to determine how to create an interface that mimics the restaurant app or the AAA app or any of the thousands of apps that let me, the end user, using my location, get the information that I want at that moment in time. What information would a person want if they are looking to relocate their business to a new community or moving their family? What information would a person want if they are in a community for a vacation and looking for a recreation center or have a question about a speeding ticket they received? 

There appear to be several approaches to development of applications. One is the house search where I enter all of the amenities that I care about and the search returns a list based on my geographic location of all of the homes that meet my criteria. Another is to basically take a snapshot of who I am (45-year-old male, divorced, one child, middle class, likes the outdoors, etc.) and guess at what I will care about. A third could be to have individual applications for each government service. So the question becomes, how do you best serve the broadest customer base? I believe the individual application approach is essentially taking the new technology and producing the same data in the new format – a recipe for blah. I see our services and data intermixed with the private sector data and searched in the same way and format. Again, the customer doesn’t care who has the data, they want the information that meets their needs. Asking a person to log in into a local government application to find out about a government operation seems old school and misses the mark on how applications are being designed in the private sector.

This is not to say that specific government applications internal to the organization and associated with specific service deliveries don’t have merit – think floods and forest fires, where you’ve got FEMA-related regulations and all government entities must respond using standardized forms and procedures. I’m speaking externally on how the individual gains the knowledge held by the local government – wherever they are in the world.

Shifting our focus from providing the information we believe is relevant to the customer in a format that we like, to thinking from their perspective forces us to think differently about the development of the mobile application. Simple things like accepting that I can log into dozens of applications using my Facebook login is a start. Understanding that the customer is asking the question in a physical place within your community and the question is most likely geographically based is another. How do we anticipate the types of questions? How do we allow people to drill down to different levels of data? How do we take our common ‘dashboard’ data and make it geographic specific and relevant for the customer?

I believe taking the time to think about changing from a land use application that allows me to see every land use application or to see the county assessors database, to something that is dynamic and relevant to the end user has great value and might put us within reach of catching up with private sector application developers.

In summary, we have an opportunity to change our behavior from the past and not just use the new technology platform to churn out the same data, but to fundamentally shift our thinking and behavior to match the data delivery system of the future. I’m excited to see what the hackathon brings forth.

Thanks to ICMA and Esri for the opportunity to participate in the roundtable discussion. It was a wonderful experience. I will see you all in Charlotte in September!