first published week of: 12/01/2014
250,000 or more population
1st Los Angeles
Los Angeles vaulted into first place in the big cities category this year after finishing ninth in the 2013 survey. CTO Steve Reneker's IT department had an extremely busy 2014, starting with the New Year's Day launch of a revamped city Web page. In addition, the city unveiled a new data portal – offering more than 800 data sets – and an online dashboard that tracks key performance indicators for the city economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations. Los Angeles adopted a cloud-first policy in July and now runs all hardware and software acquisitions through a "return on investment calculator" to see if hosted options make financial sense. One impact of the new policy is a decision announced in August to move 20 city websites – including the L.A. home page – to the open source Drupal content management platform hosted in the cloud.
2nd Kansas City, Mo.
Home of the nation's first Google Fiber implementation, Kansas City has enhanced its online presence and strengthened support for new businesses and entrepreneurs. A new city website launched earlier this year may be the largest municipal implementation of the open source Wordpress platform. The open source approach cut the cost of launching the new site by 75 percent compared with the previous Kansas City portal, according to the city. A new KC Bizcare service offers comprehensive online resources for opening a business in Kansas City, including selecting a location, obtaining licenses and permits, and complying with state and federal tax regulations. In addition, the city enacted an open data policy in March and launched data.kcmo.org, an online open data catalog offering more than 3,500 data sets. The online KCStat Dashboard lets citizens monitor city government’s performance on 24 strategic priorities. continued…