Dive Brief:
- The Los Angeles Office of the City Clerk last week launched a legislative management system featuring more than 50 years of searchable records.
- Users are able to more seamlessly track legislative items and follow City Council meetings and agendas, and residents can also receive email alerts and leave public comments through the site, according to the Office of the City Clerk.
- The LMS went live Oct. 26 and contains more than half a million documents and 172,000 City Council files. The transition was completed in under six months after work began in May.
Dive Insight:
Los Angeles City Clerk Patrice Lattimore said her office was previously using as many as five siloed systems to process items for the City Council, including for streaming meetings and tracking votes. The impetus for the new system was to provide a single, integrated, user-friendly system.
“When I was appointed City Clerk, one of my primary goals was to leverage modern technology and optimize all available resources to streamline service delivery,” Lattimore told Smart Cities Dive in an email.
One of the biggest challenges of the site transition was managing the “vast volume” of existing files alongside the continuous influx of new documents, according to Lattimore.
“Replicating and migrating into a modern system was a complex undertaking, as was identifying a vendor capable of executing the implementation within timeframe,” Lattimore said.
The new LMS is hosted on a platform provided by Concourse, a public sector software company that had a pre-developed platform which aligned with requirements the city clerk had laid out in its request for proposals, Lattimore said.
“Projects of this scale are a significant undertaking,” Concourse CEO Thomas Smyth said in a press release. “The speed at which this system went live is a testament to the hard work and leadership of the Office of the City Clerk. Los Angeles is proving that modernizing government systems doesn’t have to take years.”
Lattimore also attributed the quick turnaround to the planning and communication of the Council Public and Services team.
Lattimore said the standout feature is that the streamlined, web-based platform can serve as a central hub for legislative management.
“It provides the City Clerk, legislative staff, constituents, and the media with a more intuitive and efficient platform to access and manage legislative information,” she said.
