Product Development – City of Elgin, IL

Client Overview

The City of Elgin, IL is one of the largest cities in the state of Illinois. With more than 110,000 residents, the government is always looking for better ways to engage with the citizens.

Challenge

Elgin started using Salesforce Community Cloud as a way of managing the data and information that flows through the system. Salesforce drove all of the operations from Elgin's 311 Contact Center and several internal business functions. Along with Salesforce, a variety of other software services are used for things like utility bills, licenses and permits, and reservations. The city also had a mobile app already for 311, however it was only able to be used for the reporting things.

The city was looking for better ways to engage with citizens and people doing business with the city. To do this, they knew they needed to provide better software. They wanted an "all in one" solution for their people, enabling them to perform most functions from the comfort of their homes.

Solution

To create the best possible solution, we knew we needed to make a mobile and web platform for their citizens so they could use the service from any device. However, building a system just based on what the government already knew could lead to missing the mark.

To start, we headed up to Elgin to spend a couple days learning about the government and the town, through the eyes of the citizens. We conducted over 30 different interviews with people who either currently live or currently work in the city. This discovery lead to unique insights that weren't even considered during the RFP process, so we quickly adjusted course to ensure we could make as broad of an impact as possible.

Upon concluding the interviews and hitting the whiteboard with the project team, we got to work on a completely custom design for our new platform. Due to the diverse nature of the people who would interact with this system, we tried to make the approach as simple and straightforward as possible.

We integrated things like Firebase to handle authentication and allow us to seamlessly add different social authentication mechanisms, so users could leverage their existing accounts.

We built totally custom integrations with a few different systems used by Elgin in order to provide the opportunity to view and pay bills online, pay for permits, and other licenses. These integrations were also set up with alerting and monitoring so we could ensure uptime.

Technology

• React
• React-Native
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Elastic