How a ‘mundane’ start to digital transformations can help cities leverage AI
Hiroshi Watanabe via Getty Images
Sandy Springs, Georgia, is taking a slow and steady approach to a digital transformation project, starting with breaking down silos and building staff’s data literacy.
One Georgia suburb is on a mission to demonstrate that tech advancements don’t just happen in major hubs like Silicon Valley.
In northeast Georgia, about 20 miles north of Atlanta, the Sandy Springs community has launched a citywide digital transformation project to enhance city operations and services.
Under the digital transformation initiative, the city is “exploring how to leverage advanced analytics to be both predictive and prescriptive — anticipating and solving problems before they arise,” said Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul in an email to Route Fifty. “We’re interested in how these tools can reduce time-consuming tasks our team handles daily.”
Sandy Springs’ first endeavor is to innovate the permitting process for residents and developers.
“Applying AI during the early stages of application review will enable our staff to focus their expertise and customer service skills on later stages, where their knowledge is most valuable,” Paul explained.
The city, in partnership with Georgia Tech, applied for grant money last month from the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation — a public-private organization that supports tech innovation in Georgia — to develop an AI-enabled system to automate part of the permitting review process. AI can, for instance, be used for optical character recognition and image recognition for evaluating architectural drawings to augment human reviews.
The tech can also flag inconsistencies in documents and automate data entry processes to reduce human error and the time to approve permits, said Keith McMellen, the city’s director of data strategy, analytics and AI integration. If the city is awarded funding, officials will begin developing the tool in September.
Other projects the city could pursue include developing an AI model using GIS data to address extreme heat and heat islands in the city.
But to get there, McMellen said citywide collaboration and communication is an essential starting point, adding that he will work with the city’s steering committee, technical working group and digital development team to facilitate the digital transformation initiative.
Such communication is critical to “formulate a strategic plan and set out a list of … projects that we believe will get us from the infancy stage today to walking and running, hopefully, a year, two, three and five years from now,” McMellen said. “We are going to just go slow and steady.”
Part of that plan includes creating a data strategy to ensure future AI models and systems that the city uses are of quality and accuracy, he said.
“There is a lot of interest, but few answers, surrounding how cities are using data—not just collecting it, but solving problems with it,” Paul said.
Developing a centralized data warehouse is one way McMellen suggested that Sandy Springs could store and standardize data from its agencies “in a controlled space where we can be able to tell [if it is] accurate? Is it complete?”
Doing so could also facilitate more advanced data insights to inform the building of AI solutions, he said. City leaders could, for instance, have clearer information not just on how long a permit took to process, but what types of permits were receiving applications. That could help inform leaders’ efforts to improve engagement with the systems residents and developers use to obtain permits.
“That’s where some of the ROI is,” when it comes to starting with data for the digital transformation initiative, McMellen said. Addressing the “mundane” can enable leaders to “dig in a little bit more and do more complex things,” he explained.
Educating staff on data and AI literacy is another critical step to furthering the city’s mission and ensuring it will be impactful, McMellen said. The goal is not to replace human workers, but to upskill them and to make them comfortable leveraging more advanced tools to support digital transformations.
“When developed correctly, AI gives cities like Sandy Springs the power to work smarter,” Paul said. “This is an exciting opportunity for our city and community — to move faster, operate more efficiently, and deliver better results using technology and data that, until now, hasn’t been fully utilized.”