Modernizing Hartford’s Government Services with Accela

Hartford, Connecticut, the state’s capital and one of the oldest cities in the United States, boasts a rich historical heritage, vibrant cultural diversity, and a significant role in the insurance industry. Founded in 1635 and home to 125,000 residents, Hartford has evolved into a dynamic city known for its historical landmarks such as the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Bushnell Park. It’s a city of opportunity, hope, and success. However, as a modern urban center, Hartford faced significant challenges in managing its municipal services and data. This case study explores how the city partnered with Accela to transform its operations, streamline workflows, and enhance service delivery. This case study highlights the importance of adopting integrated solutions to enhance efficiency, collaboration, and community engagement in modern urban governance.

Hartford’s Legacy and Challenges

Despite its strengths, Hartford struggled with outdated and inefficient processes for processing permit and license applications, taking payments, and streamlining work that involved multiple offices and departments. Data entry was manual, with staff handling paper checks and application packets, creating backlogs and delays of up to four months. Lacking a common platform where departments could share data and collaborate, tasks were siloed, which led to inefficiencies, and departments couldn’t easily coordinate tasks or access shared data. Serving a tech-savvy citizenry, Hartford needed a solution to modernize its operations and build a future-looking foundation that would support its ongoing digital transformation goals.

Building a Foundation with Accela

Seeking a comprehensive solution, Hartford evaluated multiple platforms, ultimately choosing Accela. Through the Accelarators program, customers frequently welcome their colleagues in government to see how the Civic Platform and Civic Applications would help overcome their day-to-day issues in community development. Hartford took advantage of this by visiting nearby Brookline, MA to see a live demonstration of Accela in action and saw how it could be configured to their unique needs including deep GIS capabilities and supporting the same departments they wanted to bring online. This and other site visits to other Accela clients highlighted Accela’s capabilities in transforming permitting, zoning, and inspection processes.

Hartford decided to use Accela as the city’s new ‘digital front door’ to enhance service delivery in a customer-friendly manner.

Going with Accela’s standardized platform ensured Hartford would avoid the issues that come with creating a bespoke system including:

• Implementing a myriad of point solutions built without each other in mind
• Ongoing, expensive maintenance to ensure integrations are working
• The potential for the point solutions to be acquired by another vendor who eventually stops supporting it

Accela, its partner Vision33, and the team at Hartford led by GIS Manager Brett Flodine, developed a three-phase strategy comprised to achieve their goals and build a foundation to continuously improve service delivery and integrate more departments in the future:

• Reduce Manual Work – Streamline processes to minimize manual data entry and handling.
• Single Digital Front Door – Create an integrated platform for citizen engagement and service delivery.
• Cross-Departmental Collaboration – Improve coordination and data sharing among departments.

Implementation: A Three-Phase Strategy

To ensure a smooth transition, Hartford and Accela, along with implementation partner Vision33 built a strategic plan for implementation, choosing to do it in stages that would address the most pressing needs first and build a strong foundation for phases two and three.

Phase one focused on online permitting for the Building and Health & Human Services (HHS) departments by creating tools to empower citizens, businesses, and contractors. For the first time in the city’s history, HHS has been able to electronically accept, process, and issue permits and business licenses, a transition they had long desired. Electronic processing reduced the manual workload, leading to faster permit issuance and renewals. This leap forward has enabled HHS to increase efficiency and reduce the foot traffic from individuals coming in with new applications or their annual renewals. Backlogs caused by manual data entry were eliminated, and processing times significantly decreased. And now, both citizens and businesses experience a more user-friendly interface for permits and services. They’ve shifted from an operational focus to strategic initiatives like cross-department collaboration with the Hartford Fire who now utilize Accela to assist victims of fires and other disasters.

Operating in a historic area, the Planning Department manages permits required for changes to historic properties based on unique preservation laws. Utilizing shared workflows with the Building Department, Planning now has an end-to-end process in Accela where they share data and review each other’s permits. When additional information is required by the department(s), applicants proactively receive requests by email which is common with historical updates and can upload it to their online application record.

Hartford’s phase two continued their improvements to Planning and integrated Zoning, focusing on understanding the inefficiencies in their workflows and redesigning them with an eye toward simplicity. 26 record types were identified, each with a standalone workflow in the previous management system, with permit applications being the most common. Using Accela’s pre-defined record types and workflow designer, Hartford reduced the 26 original workflows down to 2 through automation, ensuring the right staff member(s) received their task(s) at the right time in the application review process. Going further, they standardized the basics of their workflows to a single process so that moving forward they could configure and save the new workflow based on its unique aspects. Beginning in the Summer of 2024, Hartford will evaluate their remaining record types and workflows to consolidate and increase departmental efficiency.

Phase Three is now underway to transform the Public Works Department and 311 which connects residents, businesses, and visitors to city services using the Accela Service Request Management (SRM) solution. SRM gives the city access to all information related to properties in a particular location to understand what requests are in process and provide deeper insights about request trends and how the city responds via service-level data.

Additionally, Mr. Flodine shared that they, “…have a program for housing loans for lower-income citizens which utilizes Accela for the required home inspections.” The city provides these loans for repair or property improvement beginning with an application for funds and then inspects the property before and after the improvement work is completed.

Lastly, they’ve begun to use Accela’s calendar capabilities which automatically schedule events for planning, zoning, and historic preservation meetings. Beginning with the calendar for zoning enforcement inspections, the required tasks and events are automatically generated when a specific milestone is reached in the zoning workflow, ensuring no steps are missed in a detailed process.

A Service-Oriented Future in Hartford

Hartford’s journey with Accela marks a significant step towards becoming a more sustainable, prosperous, equitable, and vibrant city. The near future will be highlighted by a transformation in how the city uses data to be more transparent through public-facing dashboards and maps showing the state of building permits, code violations, and the speed at which services are delivered to foster community trust and engagement. Accela’s platform is now set as a cornerstone in Hartford’s digital transformation, driving efficiency, collaboration, and innovation to benefit its citizens and business community. As Brett Flodine, GIS Manager & Accela Champion, remarked, “Accela is the best piece of software the city has ever purchased.”