Category: State or Local Government

In the public sector, civic leaders must make sure that a wide variety of citizen services are delivered efficiently, responsibly, and successfully. To identify high performing operations and support those in need of improvement, decision-makers need real-time data in formats that are simple to interpret and understand. In my 25 years of experience serving the public sector, I’ve found that there are four foundational considerations for implementing a comprehensive public sector data analytics and performance management strategy.

The AWS Institute invited Rikesh Shah, outgoing head of open innovation at Transport for London, to discuss how London’s transport authority uses data sharing principles to solve city-wide challenges like air quality and safety. Shah shares his experiences of working as head of open innovation at Transport for London (TfL), which adopted an innovative approach to working with private sector organizations to make journeys simper and faster, reducing both pollution and accident levels.

At AWS, many public sector customers operate fleets of vehicles (e.g. emergency response, public transportation) that generate location data, which is ultimately stored in a data lake. These customers frequently ask how they can quickly visualize this data and extract insights that can help them optimize how they operate their vehicle fleets. In this post, learn how to use Amazon Athena and Amazon Location Service to perform ad hoc reverse geocoding on a notional dataset of vehicle location history, and visualize the results on an Amazon QuickSight map.

In 2020, the City of Canton, Ohio set out to build a better, safer, and more connected community. The city worked with government technology (GovTech) company Wi-Fiber, a network infrastructure provider using AWS Direct Connect. Wi-Fiber combined the City of Canton’s wireless hardware, existing copper, and fiber, where available, to connect hundreds of installed devices alongside roadways, intersections, and buildings. In two years, Canton successfully intertwined its legacy infrastructure with Wi-Fiber’s technology to maximize efficacy and minimize cost.

In 2022, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) initiated a pilot project to analyze traffic patterns and provide analytics within the Philadelphia Navy Yard. PIDC employed Rekor Systems, Inc. (Rekor) to bring this pilot project to fruition. Rekor is a global artificial intelligence (AI) technology company and an AWS Public Sector Partner with a mission to provide insights that build safer, smarter, and more efficient cities worldwide through intelligent infrastructure.

Local public health departments must notify public health agencies, like state health departments or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of reportable conditions. These departments receive various types of reports of healthcare conditions through email, in addition to more traditional methods such as mail, fax, or phone calls. Local health departments can dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with manually processing email attachments and improve processing efficiency using automation. In this blog post, learn how to create an automated email attachment ingestion, storage, and processing solution powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services from AWS.

In early 2020, the Norton Police Department’s (NPD) on-premises, legacy system, failed them for the last time. Lifesaving services were down. To revive them, NPD made the decision to go live on AWS Partner SOMA Global’s public safety platform—six months ahead of the scheduled cutover date. Despite the early deployment, the SOMA platform exceeded expectations, making sure critical emergency call-taking and dispatching continued. Using SOMA also helped NPD cut costs and save time. Read on to learn how the NPD found a successful partnership with SOMA Global in their time of need.

Beginning on April 1, 2023, state Medicaid agencies (SMA) will have one year to “unwind” temporary COVID-era changes and return to pre-pandemic ways of working. A major part of that will be re-verifying that all 91 million members still qualify to receive Medicaid benefits. For nearly a year, AWS has supported SMAs with in-house Medicaid expertise to identify unwinding issues and develop solutions to address them. The top four concerns that SMAs have shared are in approaching outreach and engagement, staffing shortages, returned mail, and reporting capabilities. Learn how AWS can help states across the country overcome these challenges across different scenarios.

AWS is helping the 911 community mitigate the impact of staffing shortages on call wait times by providing 911 centers the means to automate the receipt and resolution of designated non-emergency calls. Learn how the Jefferson County Communications Center Authority is already seeing improvements using an AWS solution, and discover the solution’s components that support 911 centers in handling non-emergency calls at scale.

On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in Southwest Florida. At the request of standby organizations Help.NGO and Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), the AWS Disaster Preparedness and Response team assisted with response operations across a variety of functions in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.