Pasadena Named as a Top-Ranked City in Digital Cities Survey

The City of Pasadena has been selected as one of the top-ranked “digital cities” in the United States, according to the 2019 Digital Cities Survey by the Center for Digital Government.

The results were announced Thursday. Phillip Leclair, Chief Information Officer for Pasadena’s Department of Information Technology, said this is the fifth time Pasadena has been recognized by the CDG as a technologically progressive and innovative city.

The CDG is a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government. Among other awards, the Center also gives out Digital States and Digital Counties awards on an annual basis.

In the 2019 Digital Survey, Pasadena ranked fifth in the category of cities with a population between 125,000 and 249,999. The survey also described Pasadena as a municipality where officials have been working to improve citizen engagement, coupled with key planning and progress on other tech projects.

The survey also highlighted the City’s other tech achievements including the use of dashboards and data in City operations, cybersecurity investments, and partnerships with the tech community and other institutions for innovation projects.

“Pasadena has made investments to enhance communication, debuting a ZenCity presence that brings together social and traditional media with data sets to better understand community talking points,” part of the CDG read. “The city is continuing work from 2018 with Meltwater to better manage marketing and branding through its social media monitoring solution. Staffers created and launched the first phase of new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance metrics across the enterprise. Plans are to develop an interactive dashboard to display those metrics this fiscal year.”

The survey also took note of Pasadena’s plan to revisit cybersecurity strategy during the next year to 18 months, including its cybersecurity response, identity and access management, and cloud security plans.

“The city issued an RFP this year, to do an Information Risk Assessment and help the IT security officer’s team improve security practices,” the survey said. “The city and the California Institute of Technology received a National Science Foundation Grant. In a collaboration that expanded this year, the partners are working on using fiber optics to measure earthquakes.”

Pasadena and the other top cities will be honored at a special awards ceremony during the National League of Cities annual conference in San Antonio, Texas on November 21.

For complete survey results and more information about the award, visit www.govtech.com/dc/digital-cities/Digital-Cities-Survey-2019—Winners-Announced.html.