Gainesville, Florida launches strategic vision pursuit platform

The city of Gainesville, Florida has hired a provider to build a cloud-based platform that will help them execute their strategic plan.

The city’s leadership team had previously used Excel spreadsheets as the primary method of monitoring this progress, said senior strategic planner Laura Graetz. It was very manual and time consuming, so officials decided to find a solution that could use available data to improve decision-making.

After a six month search, the city selected Envisio to create the new tool, and the city recently completed the incorporation of their strategic plan into the platform, which Graetz says will go live for the city’s leadership team this month. A publicly accessible dashboard will follow shortly.

Mike Bell, Co-Founder and CEO of Envisio, told Government Technology in a written response that the publicly available component is expected to be released by June 2022.

Bell underlined the importance of cloud-based solutions in a modern government, as they ensure that employees can access the software from anywhere – in the field or in the home office. Many local governments have aggressively switched to cloud-based solutions since the COVID-19 pandemic began, he added.

“The ability to support remote working is critical now, and doing strategic plans involves dozens, sometimes hundreds, of the city’s employees,” said Bell.

The new tool helps organize the many moving parts of a strategic plan, Graetz explained, in order to achieve the strategic goals and monitor any projects that help achieve them. The platform, she said, will help the city make decisions in the most equitable way by providing better oversight over the various projects.

Bell stated that the platform will allow employees to understand and report on performance by providing a central view of various projects and providing the city commission with quarterly progress updates.

Graetz pointed to the future possibility of expanding the platform to include the city’s master plan, capital improvement plan, and budget.

The creation of this platform complements other steps the city has taken to provide greater transparency to citizens. Graetz said that effort began about six years ago with the launch of an open data portal the city operates with Socrata and Tyler Technologies to share a range of city data.

“I really see an opportunity for us to incorporate the work that is being done on the strategic plan into the open data portal so that we can do a really good job of telling our neighbors about our work, to further build the community around their needs to satisfy. “said Grätz.

Julia Edinger works for Government Technology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Toledo and has worked in publishing and media ever since. It is currently located in Southern California.

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