Page 80 - Security Today, March 2020

Ohio County Taps
SOtartups for Automation By Stephanie Kanowitz
fficials in Cuyahoga County, Ohio are looking to digitize and automate paper-based processes at several agencies through
a program that encourages governments, startups and small businesses to collabo- rate on solutions.
City Innovate’s Startup in Residence (STIR) program recently announced that 50 civic challenges—including six in Cuyahoga County—have been selected to receive proposed solutions from business- es through Nov. 20. After that, the govern- ments will work with the companies for 16 weeks to hone the solution to meet their needs, although there is no guarantee of a contract award at the end.
To determine the projects best- suited for STIR, Catherine Tkachyk, Cuyahoga County chief innovation and performance officer, and Matt Hrubey, performance consultant at the county’s Office of Innovation and Performance, met with staff from county departments and agencies and evaluated their pitches based on several criteria: timing, cost and needs vs. wants.
The question they wanted to answer, Hrubey said, was, “what are the best op- tions for Cuyahoga County overall to show improvement?”
For example, the Delinquent Tax Out- reach Unit wanted a way to automate outreach efforts. When residents don’t pay their property taxes on time, “they get pen- alties, fees and they all add up and eventu- ally lead to ... foreclosure,” Tkachyk said.
That’s a situation prime for artificial intelligence and machine learning tech- nology that can identify trends and what prompts people to pay on time. With that information, the department can predict when people may miss a payment and alert them before it happens, she added.
The Division of Children and Family Services is also looking to automation for efficiency. Case workers spend hours in their cars and then have to manually enter that time each month into reports to get
reimbursed for mileage. An ideal solution would automatically track caseworkers’ mileage using their smartphones and al- low for notes about why, for example, they didn’t take the most direct route to a loca- tion, Tkachyk said.
The Office of Early Childhood wants an automated solution to handle key man- agement functions of the county’s Univer- sal Pre-Kindergarten program. A single platform would allow the office to elimi- nate paper, communicate with schools and parents electronically, capture the data that’s coming in and use it in a functional way – namely, creating visualizations.
For those three challenges, Tkachyk said solutions likely already exist. She’s
hoping STIR can help the county deter- mine the best one.
“[STIR] allows us to be involved in de- sign and share a little bit of what the intri- cacies are of our county and what works for us,” she said. “Sometimes what’s off the shelf, especially if it’s made for large organizations, they don’t always work.”
The development department, for ex- ample, wants a more specialized digital solution to make business decision-mak- ers aware of land and buildings available for business use. A tool exists for resi- dential properties, but not commercial, Hrubey said.
“We know where the information is in a lot of cases, where we have it, but how to
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