Q&A with South Bend CIO Denise Linn Riedl on city’s digital transformation
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Among several cities with 75,000–125,000 residents, the city of South Bend, was named the No.1 Digital City at the 2024 National League of Cities Conference.
Established by the Center for Digital Government to recognize cities improving constituent services through innovative technology, South Bend won first place for incorporating generative AI, expanding the Open WiFi Network, and the revamped Police Transparency Hub.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with South Bend Chief Innovation Officer Denise Linn Riedl about the digital transformation that is occurring within city government.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Speaking about the Digital Cities Awards, what key strategies propelled the city from not making the top 10 in 2014 to being No. 1 a decade later?
We’ve done a lot since then. We built up a whole new cybersecurity program in the last three years. We turned on 311 digital requests. People can submit requests online, in addition to calling 311, for any of our city services. We built up a data and performance team here at the city, so we’d be a very data-driven administration, tracking everything from potholes, traffic calming efforts to public safety. On the digital services side of things, since 2014, we have done a website redesign, and have been constantly doing little projects every year to improve website navigation and experience. We’re updating our systems, we’re getting better data, and we’re using that data to improve the way the government operates. That’s the main goal.
As a city CIO, one thing I really appreciate is that Mayor [James] Mueller has really seen the value of technology and how it intersects with his priorities and with residents’ priorities. It’s very rare someone will call in or speak about their support for technology during budget season. But they’ll come up and say, “I care about my neighborhood’s infrastructure,” or “I care about economic development.”
It’s been wonderful to have city leadership, the mayor and department heads, see how technology intersects with their goals, and to have the change and innovation appetite across leadership at the city to try new things. Whether it’s leveraging AI to get road conditions, or whether it’s upgrading old software so we can get better data about how residents use services, or whether it’s sitting down periodically and looking at data and being data driven as a team.
That kind of data driven and innovation tolerant culture is what really makes this work possible. I’ve worked at and with other cities, and I think what we have here in South Bend, with the mayor’s support and other city leadership is really quite remarkable.
Riedl speaks about some of the digital transformation projects the city undertook as well as the importance of leadership buy-in.
How is the city incorporating generative AI into the work that you’re doing?
At the end of 2023, I published a generative AI policy for the city, just to make sure that all of our employees knew how they could and could not use generative AI tools to do their work, so they could responsibly experiment. We’ve done a couple of targeted projects last year. We have a few beta testing tools here. We built out a document-based translation app for city workers, so you can upload a flyer, PowerPoint or any kind of formatted document, and it spits out a translation very fast. That’s always been a very manual and informal process here at the city. Now we don’t have to worry about reformatting the document, so it’s really helped save time.
We’re experimenting with how we can use AI to save residents’ and employees’ time. We’re beta testing an internal generative AI chat bot for the city, to improve our employees’ experiences as they navigate really dense information around their benefits and different internal policies at the city, making sure they’re getting resources literally at their fingertips in a very user-friendly way.
Those are the two big projects we’ve been doing with generative AI, but we encourage our employees to use generative AI web tools. We have done some internal generative AI training too to help manage that change because ultimately, we want our employees to be a part of the change. We don’t want them to feel like it’s happening to them or disrupting their lives, we want to make sure that everyone feels empowered and a part of it.
For the South Bend Open WiFi Network, how did your team prioritize which neighborhoods to focus on, and how are you tracking the impact so far?
We actually did a public call to all of our residents, and that was a couple years ago. We asked residents to nominate locations that they wanted to be on the South Bend Open WiFi. We had about 50 wireless access points around the city, mostly downtown, and we knew we could spread into neighborhood corridors. We knew that we could go to more locations that were transient in nature, and we wanted to hear from residents where those spaces were, where we could have the most impact. And so residents submitted nominations, and then we actually planned one of our expansion phases around those nominations so that we could hit those priority areas for people.
Our network has now spread from being basically just downtown to East Bank, and includes some neighborhood corridors like Mishawaka Avenue, River Park, Miami, as well as some key community partners, like La Casa de Amistad. We’re able to find out where people are and give them a little bit of access. One thing we learned during COVID was that at-home internet is so important to make sure people can access educational opportunities, apply for jobs, and access digital city services if they want. But it wasn’t just about at home access. People are moving around a lot, they’re in school, then at a community center, at a relative’s house, and then they’re back at their house. We realized we needed to have this multi-pronged approach, where we’re helping people get internet at home, but we’re also making sure they’re connected wherever they are. We’re continuing to go down that path and hopefully give people more options, so that they have an option no matter where they are.
And why was updating the Police Transparency Hub a priority for the city this year?
It was a priority for the mayor and the police chief. They are important partners that care deeply about transparency. Public safety has been a big priority for many cities in the last couple of years, including South Bend, and it just felt like a good time. We had residents that wanted a more user-friendly interface to interact with the data. So we wanted to make sure that we redesigned it to make it more understandable, intuitive and user friendly. At the end of the day, as much as we make the information public and transparent, making it easy to understand is the ultimate goal.
Have there been any partnerships that have contributed to the city’s technological advancements? And are you planning any new collaborations for 2025?
Honestly, all of the partners that we have in the South Bend region are really special. Notre Dame is a very service-oriented university. I’ve had the pleasure of working in different communities, and I’ve found the partnership with Notre Dame particularly meaningful. They care about research, they care about service and you can sense that from the administration, as well as from individual academics and researchers at the university.
Right now, we are in the middle of a tech hub planning grant from the Department of Commerce to ideate around how this region can be an advanced wireless hub for the country. That’s going very well, and we’re excited to see where that planning grant takes us. So that’s one of the most exciting things. There’s always a lot of little collaborations we have with different centers and academics. Whether it’s delving into questions around ethics and AI with the Lucy Institute, or working with the Center for Civic Innovation on urban sensing. It’s just amazing to see other partners locally, we’re very fortunate to have such a great technology powerhouse like Aunalytics here. They really helped us up our IT and cybersecurity game as a city, and they’re a great pipeline for talent in this region.
There are so many things that we’re planning to do with community partners going into 2025.
Which interdepartmental collaboration had the most measurable impact on service delivery for 2024?
That’s a hard one; there’s so many. We worked with legal to digitize the ARPA process. We’ve gotten lots of feedback from residents that they love it and it’s now much easier for them to request information from the city. That’s an example of a little project with a small department that’s made a big impact.
We’ve also been doing a lot of work with Venues, Parks and Arts this year. Whether it’s revamping the passes that people buy for Howard Park skating, etc. We’re going through a strategic process with them now to update the recreation software, which is so exciting.
A big project for us right now as a city is figuring out how we can streamline the experience for our residents at all of the different city departments that process payments. Looking at how we can create new options for people who are paying their bills or their fines and fees. We made a lot of progress on that front in 2024, and we’ll likely be launching some new stuff in Q1.
Do you have any ongoing collaborations with the other cities and towns in the region?
We work closely with St. Joseph County, they’re always good to collaborate with. Regionally, honestly not as much as I would like. I definitely think there’s more to be done, especially around IT, workforce training, security, fundamental infrastructure, etc. I think those are subjects that are ripe for collaboration.
Are there any specific resident services your team is prioritizing for the One Stop Shop initiative?
We’d like to be able to process almost any payment at the city. The most popular ones being around code enforcement, parking fines and fees, as well as utility bills. Those are the most popular things that we tend to get every single day. But of course, it’s a city, so there’s always lots of seasonal things that One Stop Shop will service. Whether it’s making sure people are aware of leaf pickup schedules or making sure people are aware of cyclical grant applications for small businesses or for residents.
Are there any processes that you’re particularly excited to automate? And how do you make sure that the elderly are not left out of the digital transformation that’s happening in the city?
I’m glad you asked that, because this is why government technology is so hard. You have to serve everyone, regardless of whether they want to use the technology or not, and that’s what makes it rewarding but hard. This is why the government will always have an in-person option. We’re always going to have a paper form for accessibility reasons, so that’s just something we have to maintain, regardless of new innovations with AI and new digital forms.
I’m very excited about the Venues, Parks and Arts recreation software, and improving that experience for our residents. In addition to being CIO for the city, I’m also a big consumer of VPA, and I think they’re a big driver of quality of life in this area. I’ve got three little kids, we love parks, and we’re there every single week. Having a streamlined registration process and an improved resident experience is going to be wonderful.
We’re going to do more generative AI work this year. Our team is working with the utility team to streamline the resident onboarding process. Turning three paper forms into one digital form has been a big lift. But setting up utilities is a really important moment for any resident, and is usually your first interaction with the city. South Bend is a growing city, and if that’s the first interaction you have with the city government, we want it to be really positive. You could always call 311, and they can do it for you. But it was a very meaningful process to streamline and digitize, and so that’s been wonderful.
What did you do before landing this role?
Before this role, I was sort of a nomad. I was most recently in Chicago with an organization called the City Tech Collaborative. We did a lot of smart city piloting, and urban technology work with the city of Chicago. We would prototype new solutions with the private sector and test them in the city. Things like smart green infrastructure, behavioral insights, mobility, urban sensing etc. Before that, I did digital equity, open data and civic tech work in Chicago too. I’ve always been interested in the intersection of government and technology, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing that in several communities. I’ve been here now for six years.
How did you know you were interested in that intersection between government and technology?
Oh, it was a while ago. When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I worked at my radio station at the University of Virginia. It was actually a private radio station that was run by students. We were one of the first college radio stations to actually win an FCC license at a spectrum auction. I got to know alums who worked on the telecommunications side of things, and through that experience, I learned I was more interested in the airwaves I was broadcasting over than the things I was actually saying. It opened up this whole world of the intersection of government and technology. Not only all of the lesser known ways the government manages technology and innovation at the federal and local levels, but also all the ways technology, data and new digital tools can transform resident services at every level of government.
After college, I worked with the Federal Communications Commission in the spectrum auctions division. We assigned licenses, and did reverse auctions to try and get rural and tribal areas connected to the internet and to mobile service, and that was very rewarding. At the time, things like Google Fiber were happening, cities like Chattanooga were developing their own telecommunications and fiber networks, and I realized how interesting the local level was. It was experiencing this renaissance. CIOs were starting to think of themselves as strategic technology leaders in their communities. Cities were hiring CDOs—chief data officers and chief digital officers—for the first time.
That was fascinating and I knew I wanted to pivot to local, so I did. I went to grad school, and I was able to go to Chicago after and flex those muscles in the public-private sector and in the philanthropic sector.