State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

7 Likely Technology Breakthroughs in 2017

Data-Smart City Solutions: I've been involved with local government for 30 years, and I've spent much of that time trying to identify technologies that would help to dramatically improve service delivery and lower costs. To some extent, everything has changed during those three decades. But if there's one thing I'm confident about, it's this: the advances of the past have only set the stage for ever more sweeping transformation.

Twenty-five years ago, as a young district attorney in Indianapolis, I wanted our office to lead the country in child support enforcement; it turned out that putting a few smart public employees in a room and giving them access to a wide variety of local and state data would help us increase collections from $900,000 a year to $38 million. We followed with "JUSTIS," the country's first totally integrated criminal justice system, which improved results by coupling cross-agency, easily accessible data with clear system-level metrics.

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