2023 Challenges
The Smart City Challenge is conducted annually and prioritizes the equitable use of technology to solve City challenges. City staff identify opportunities for improvement based on their frontline experiences.
The 2023 Smart City Challenge cohort includes five challenges from three Departments that seek to tackle issues including digital accessibility, improve response time for City residents, and immersive educational experiences. Below is the complete list of participating Departments and challenge statements. The submission period for the 2023 Smart City Challenge has now closed.
To learn more about Long Beach Buys, please see the resources available on the Purchasing Division's website.
Challenge Directory:
- Parks, Recreation, & Marine: Immersive Travel Experience
- Technology & Innovation: Digital Front Door
- Technology & Innovation: Geographic Ticketing System
- Technology & Innovation: Help Desk Improvement
- Water: Meter Evaluation
Parks, Recreation & Marine Department: Immersive Travel Experience
Challenge Statement:
The Parks, Recreation, and Marine Department is seeking an immersive, interactive, educational, and fun technology-based solution to provide global travel experiences for youth, teenagers, and older adults at City parks.
Background:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, PRM developed a virtual recreation program where teenagers, youth, and older adults logged on from home for educational visits and travel experiences using Youtube. This program allowed participants to explore outside of Long Beach at a time where travel was restricted during the pandemic.
Now, PRM would like to expand this program for their Summer 2023 programming, and leverage technology resources to provide travel and educational experiences. PRM would like to provide access to participants who don't have access to travel to certain locations or to learn about fun topics. PRM would like to roll out this new and improved virtual recreational program on June 19 2023 for a period of 10 weeks. PRM would like the selected technology solution to offer a wide array of travel destinations (near and far) and educational services in one platform. PRM would also like the technology solution to complement and generate interest in its in-person events.
To learn more and apply to the Parks, Recreation, and Marine Immersive Travel Experience opportunity visit Long Beach Buys.
Technology & Innovation Department: Digital Front Door
Challenge Statement:
The Long Beach Technology & Innovation Department is seeking a responsive tool to efficiently connect users to the information, services, and contacts they need across the City’s website increasing accessibility and user satisfaction.
Background:
The City of Long Beach’s website hosts information about our 24 Departments across more than 7,000 pages. With this much information available, it can be challenging for a visitor to know where to find the exact information they need. This becomes even more cumbersome when a user needs information from multiple departments for the same task. Additionally, 60% of our visitors access the site through a mobile device further complicating a user’s ability through limited functionality.
To learn more and apply to the Technology and Innovation Ai Chatbot opportunity visit Long Beach Buys.
Technology & Innovation Department: Geographic Ticketing System
Challenge Statement:
The Technology and Innovation Department / Desktop Support Team is seeking a simple and mobile-friendly solution that integrates with ServiceNow service management ticketing system to improve efficiency of the Desktop Support staff so they can group the tickets by region to reduce the travel time as well as the resolution time for City Employees’ requests for support.
Background:
We use ServiceNow for our ticketing system. We get incidents and requests for service by city employees located at various city facilities all over the city. We would like to see if there is an application that can integrate with ServiceNow to group incidents and/or tasks geographically based on a person's location (as specified in their ServiceNow user profile) so that we can respond to requests that are geographically close together.
To earn more and apply to the Technology and Innovation Geographic Ticketing System opportunity visitLong Beach Buys.
Technology & Innovation Department: Help Desk Improvement
Challenge Statement:
The Technology and Innovation Department Help Desk Team is seeking a simple and reliable software solution that uses smart technologies to improve the quality of our help desk call center operations, improve user satisfaction, and improve tracking of first call resolution.
Background:
We currently have the Help Desk call center software which we use in conjunction with Service Now Service Management system. Our current software is able to record calls but does not provide any kind of AI type features or analysis functions which would allow us to flag terms spoken during the call. We are seeking a solution what would help us to review and improve the interaction between help desk staff and our users in a more automated and intelligent way.
To learn more and apply to the Technology and Innovation's Help Desk Improvement opportunity visit Long Beach Buys.
Water Department: Meter Evaluation
Challenge Statement:
The Long Beach Water Department is seeking a remote solution that can manage individual and group meter degradation to inform the Meter Evaluation for Degradation and Revenue Recovery Project to help City staff improve capital planning.
Background:
LBWD delivers safe and reliable drinking water to over 470,000 residents in the City of Long Beach and has more than 95,000 potable water service connections to residential, commercial, industrial, and irrigation customers. In 2019, the LBWD deployed its Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) Project and substantially completed the work in 2021 with nearly 98% of AMI meters installed. The Department would like to explore new technology and services to improve ongoing meter management efforts.
The solution should support the Project by mapping for spatial analysis, perform complex queries in a user-friendly way, provide optimized routing for City staff visiting problematic/targeted meters once they have been identified, provide direct integration capabilities with existing systems, and protect sensitive customer information by being compliant with information security standards.
