The City of Seattle sits on Puget Sound in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and is the largest city in the state of Washington, supporting a population of more than 750,000. As a city, Seattle is known as a progressive leader in technology, innovation and the environment.
The City of Seattle was tasked to consolidate its several IT departments into one department which it called ‘Seattle IT’. Previously, separate teams supported the technology needs of many individual city departments such as power and utilities, transportation services, parks and recreation, courts, police, fire, facilities management, and more — around 50 departments in all. This distributed model resulted in a lot of duplication of processes and effort across the board.
The greatest challenge Seattle IT faced was the lack of standard, shared, day-to-day repeatable processes and a better way to discover and track assets. The separate IT teams had their own processes and data repositories.
Previously, as Jenny explained, there were occasional efforts to take physical inventory and somehow track assets, but it was difficult to execute and data was difficult to maintain with the disparate existing systems in place, which led to a lack of ownership and accountability at all levels.