CITY OF MESA
“ One of the great things about being in Mesa is we have a city council and a city manager’ s office that is extremely supportive of technology and of IT in particular,” Scott proudly states.“ We call ourselves the Department of Innovation and Technology, otherwise known as‘ DoIT’. Now, a lot of other city departments are starting to call themselves DoIT.
“ I just want to make it clear: Mesa was the first. I’ m absolutely honoured and flattered that people want to copy what we’ re doing with the name, but it is an accurate description of what we do here in Mesa.
“ With the city council’ s support, we are able to experiment with things other cities are uncomfortable doing. In my prior two cities, they had more of a philosophy of‘ We’ re not even going to look at this until 20 other places are actively using it and are being successful with it.’
“ But in Mesa, we’ ve taken the opposite approach. We like to be the first and then share our successes with others.”
This appetite for experimentation has turned Mesa into a magnet for ambitious tech professionals, with 166 people in Scott’ s team.
“ A lot of people talk about doing the work we do, but not many actually do it,” Scott continues.“ But our department motto is doing what others only dream. And that’ s why we recruit the top talent from across the country to come here and work in this city.“ A lot of places don’ t have their own application development team.
“ THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENCE IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE THE HUMAN LAYER, AND THAT REQUIRES PEOPLE TO BE EDUCATED ABOUT THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ATTACKS OUT THERE”
Scott Conn CIO City of Mesa
Well, we do here. And we have our Program Management Office, where the majority of projects in the city run on underlying technology.”
The City also has its own help-desk team with a 98 % customer satisfaction rating, as well as its own desktop, infrastructure, fibre installation, radio and universal communications teams.
“ We don’ t have a specific AI department,” Scott adds.“ But we let each team leverage AI opportunities wherever they see it’ s going to make a difference – like AI for automated call routing, AI for scheduling contractors and the AI chatbot on our website.”
6 mesaaz. gov