The city of Cary, North Carolina has been taking steps over the past year to launch several connected technology initiatives to increase the efficiency of municipal services and improve the quality of residents’ lives.
The town recently partnered with Cisco to better manage parking in the downtown area using Cisco Kinetic for Cities – a unified Internet of Things (IoT) platform strategy – which enables the city to monitor the number of available parking spots and provide data for future planning. Static water meters have been replaced with an automated meter infrastructure that allow it to better monitor and alert residents to water use as well as possible leaks.
Cary CIO Nicole Raimundo has worked to centralize all of the town’s services on the Salesforce platform. She has also outsourced many IT services and has designed a strategy for moving services to the cloud. Using the Salesforce platform provides the government a central portal for all IT services.
“It eliminates all hardware maintenance, so you’re not having to do all that upgrading on site — you don’t have to upgrade the hardware, the operating system or go through that whole headache of testing. That’s outsourced to the vendor and you don’t have to deal with it,” says the city’s chief technical officer Peter Kennedy. “A platform approach makes us more nimble.”
The long-term goal is to provide residents with a single portal where they can log in and conduct all city business. “It can be calling up to say that the city missed their trash, or pay a bill, set up a class for children — the idea is that you would have one place to go and also one number to call,” says Kennedy.
