Processing 70,000 approvals and 140,000 inspections annually requires more than good technology—it demands an exceptional partnership between IT and business operations. California’s second-largest city has cracked the code on something most municipalities struggle with: true collaboration between technology and business teams that delivers real results for residents.
In this episode of Civic Innovators, hosts Noam Reininger, CEO of Accela, and Joe Morris, Chief Innovation Officer at Government Technology, sit down with two leaders who have built one of the strongest IT-business partnerships in local government: Elyse Lowe, Director of Development Services for the City of San Diego, and Jonathan Behnke, the city’s Chief Information Officer.
What stands out about San Diego isn’t just their impressive scale—it’s how they’ve structured governance, communication, and strategic alignment to ensure that technology serves business needs, and business needs drive technology innovation. As Lowe describes it: “Working for development services is like being on a rocket ship and you have just got to get in and jump in and hang on.”
The Foundation: Communication as Strategy
“The partnership starts with communication,” Behnke explains. “There’s a lot going on in Elyse’s world. There’s certainly a lot going on in IT to get both those worlds aligned.”
But this isn’t casual check-ins or occasional status updates. San Diego has built systematic communication into the DNA of how IT and business operate together:
Quarterly Roadmap Meetings: IT meets with each department to review their application portfolio and plan ahead. This feeds IT’s strategic plan, which updates annually.
Weekly Collaboration (When Needed): “Our teams convene, if necessary, weekly or more to ensure that we’ve really worked through all of the issues that come up,” Lowe explains. When situations become critical, “everyone is able to jump in. Our teams are so dedicated if necessary. We put in time after hours just to get through every detail.”
Cross-Functional Expertise: The partnership extends beyond departmental portfolios. Development Services helps IT with its broadband master plan, leveraging their construction expertise. They also feed the enterprise asset management system.
Lowe makes clear the dependency: “Development services department as a permitting function for the city of San Diego really does depend on our collaboration with the city’s overall department of IT. Their expertise lending it to us as part of our business strategy is just absolutely critical.”
Formalized Governance: The Secret Sauce
What separates San Diego from cities that struggle with IT-business alignment? Formalized governance structures that define roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes.
Administrative Regulation: San Diego has codified its governance structure in administrative regulation. “That really defines the roles and responsibilities,” Behnke explains, “making sure that the applications are supportable, that they’re secure, that we use our platforms and standards when we can, when they’re available.”
Strategic Technology Advisory Committee: Every director in the city participates in this committee, which meets annually (with work happening between meetings). The purpose? Ensure the city prioritizes resources for projects with the greatest strategic fit and best return on investment.
City Council Visibility: All this work gets presented to city council in closed session every year, giving elected officials insights into risks being addressed through modernization and how these initiatives benefit both internal operations and the public.
Data Governance Program: A strong data governance program stresses the value of the city’s data assets.
“It’s really helpful to have the roadmap that the IT governance came through with the city’s administrative regulation,” Lowe notes. “We always know what we need to do sort of next on the checklist.”
The One-Stop Shop Advantage
San Diego’s Development Services operates as a “one-stop shop”—a structure that differentiates them from other large cities. “We operate differently than other large cities,” Lowe explains. “We’ve been able to bring everything under one roof which makes the change management a little bit more palatable at least easier to do due to the way that we can consolidate and have efficiency and training and testing.”
This consolidation creates a massive operating enterprise. As Lowe emphasizes: “Development services is such a big operating enterprise function for the city of San Diego. We cannot let it ever fail. And so working towards all of our fail safes and ensuring that we’ve got the right tweaks and that we’re headed the right direction.”
Customer Engagement at Scale
With 70,000 approvals and 140,000 inspections in 2023 alone, San Diego can’t afford to neglect customer engagement. They’ve built a comprehensive approach:
Quarterly Technical Advisory Committee: Meetings with customers specifically about digital process implementation and changes to permit flow.
24/7 Training Webinars: “We record webinars, training webinars. So that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if someone has a question on a technical aspect the answer is typically there,” Lowe explains.
Monthly Building Industry Association Meetings: “We meet monthly with the building industry association and hear a lot from users of the system about what their successes and pitfalls are and we’re always just very focused on the customer feedback about how we can improve our system.”
Dedicated Training Department: Subject matter experts regularly reach out to customers, ensuring both internal staff and external stakeholders understand new programs and functionalities.
This customer-centric approach recognizes that digital transformation isn’t just about internal operations—it’s about ensuring customers can navigate the new systems with confidence.
Scaling Through Cloud Transformation
“And it is all about scale,” Behnke emphasizes. To meet the service levels Development Services requires, IT has undertaken significant infrastructure modernization:
Cloud Transformation: “We’ve done quite a bit of cloud transformation to scale up to meet the levels of services that they’re providing, make sure that the customers have a good experience. There’s no latency.”
Service Level Agreements: Built-in SLAs on the backend ensure they’re hitting three nines or five nines of availability (99.9% or 99.999% uptime).
Constant Monitoring: If issues are encountered, they’re found immediately and escalated to the incident response team.
Power BI and Analytics at Scale: “Elyse was one of the first departments to expand Power BI and reporting,” Behnke notes. “Elyse and her team have done some great work on data and analytics again at a scale above a lot of the other departments.”
Lowe’s response? “We’re always pushing the envelope.”
The Continuous Improvement Mindset
How do you build continuous improvement into organizational DNA? Lowe’s description captures it: “The mindset comes back to we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it together. There’s just it’s such a big moving force that we’re all always in it together and we have each other’s backs and we hear each other out. It’s a really great team atmosphere pretty much at all times.”
“I think it’s driven by every one of the team members wanting to deliver the best product that they can to our customers.”
Looking Forward: AI and Emerging Technologies
The partnership continues to push into new territory. “I think that’s the most exciting part of the partnership,” Behnke says. “As it runs into emerging technologies I will ping Elyse and say hey Elyse I see this great technology—maybe it’s artificial intelligence workflows whatever it might be that your department services might be able to drive some improvements.”
They’ve conducted pilots together, with Development Services’ feedback helping IT understand what works at scale. Behnke leans on Lowe’s department “for innovation in the city, emerging technologies with the scale that they operate at. They are great partners for innovation.”
Behnke is now overseeing artificial intelligence development citywide, establishing governance for what the city will allow. And Lowe’s team members are part of developing that policy on behalf of San Diego.
7 Key Lessons for Other Municipalities
- Train Both Employees AND Customers: “A lesson learned when you’re undergoing a significant transformation if you are shifting from paper to digital is keep in mind that your initial focus will be on ensuring that your employees are well trained and understand new programs and new functionalities,” Lowe advises. “But it’s just as important to ensure that your customers find that same level of education to feel comfortable with the permitting process.”
- Start with the IT-Business Partnership: “I think the theme of this discussion really that IT business partnership is the starting point and strong communications,” Behnke emphasizes.
- Define Roles and Responsibilities: “We might assume that the department is doing something or they might assume we’re doing something. So it’s important just to have those roles and responsibilities well defined,” Behnke notes.
- Create Multi-Year Roadmaps: Seeing the large endeavors IT is taking on and understanding impacts to business operations—and vice versa—requires strategic planning that extends beyond annual cycles.
- Constant Communication: “That constant communication, I think really helps get both departments aligned,” Behnke reflects, “and then our contracted services behind the scenes, managed service providers, just making sure that everybody’s going the same direction and we’ve got that multi-year strategic plan in place to guide our paths.”
- Build Formalized Governance: Don’t rely on informal relationships. Codify governance structures, create strategic advisory committees, and ensure city leadership has visibility into technology investments and risks.
- Engage Customers Continuously: Quarterly technical advisory committees, monthly industry meetings, 24/7 training resources, and dedicated training departments ensure customers succeed with new systems.
San Diego’s success isn’t about having unlimited resources or cutting-edge technology. It’s about structure, communication, and a genuine partnership where IT and business see themselves as one team serving the same customers.
As Lowe describes the culture: “We’re going to do it. We’re going to do it together. We’re all always in it together and we have each other’s backs.” That mindset, codified in governance structures and manifested through relentless communication, is what transforms scale from a challenge into a competitive advantage.
For municipalities struggling with IT-business alignment, San Diego provides a clear roadmap: formalize governance, communicate constantly, define roles clearly, engage customers proactively, and never stop pushing the envelope.
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Dive deeper into Elyse Lowe and Jonathan Behnke’s partnership strategies, and read the full transcript below to discover how San Diego built governance structures that deliver results at scale.
Noam Reininger (00:13):
Welcome to the Civic Innovators podcast. This is where we explore how cities and counties are transforming services, elevating operational, and delivering exceptional citizen services. I’m Noam Reininger, the CEO of Accela.
Joe Morris (00:29):
And I’m Joe Morris, chief innovation officer with government technology. We’re excited to be joined by two leaders who have built one of the strongest IT business partnerships that we’ve seen in local government. Elyse Lowe, the director of development services with the city of San Diego, and Jonathan Behnke, the chief information officer.
So, San Diego is California’s second largest city with over 1.3 million residents. San Diego is known for its innovation, its cultural diversity, and for delivering great services to its constituents. What’s really exciting about San Diego and what stands out is a tremendous partnership between the business and the IT departments within the city and the governance structures that this team has put in place. From delivering more consistent outcomes to residents to aligning strategic priorities across multiple departments, San Diego’s built a model for how cities can adopt technology in a thoughtful scalable way. Their governance structure, the partnership between development services and IT commitment to continuous improvement have become best practices for municipalities that are now being studied across the country. So, in this episode, we’re going to learn from Elyse and Jonathan, how they’ve structured their partnership, how they’ve scaled it, and how they’ve put together a governance model that guarantees and helps for much better outcomes. We’re also going to explore how agencies can replicate this model and look at what leadership lessons San Diego’s learned along the way and how a strong partnership between IT and business can lead to better outcomes for all stakeholders.
So the one big question today is all about IT and the business together and the partnership and we’re going to get right into the governance structures as well and how that’s helped deliver great services. So Elyse Jonathan as we think about San Diego tell us a little bit about the partnership that you all have between your teams. Maybe Jonathan, we’ll start with you and then go to Elyse.
Jonathan Behnke (02:37):
Yeah. Yeah. The partnership starts with communication. I think we want to have consistent communications. There’s a lot going on in Elyse’s world. There’s certainly a lot going on in IT to get both those worlds aligned. And so for us, we’ll do quarterly roadmap meetings with each department looking at their application portfolio, planning ahead. That helps us feed our IT strategic plan that we update annually. And we create roadmaps for each department’s application portfolio and make sure that they’re supported, they’re secure, and they meet the technical standards that are put through the city. And then that partnership goes outside of even the departmental portfolio. Elyse’s team is helping the Department of IT with its broadband master plan with their expertise on the broadband construction that’s taking place across the city. And then they’re helping us feed our enterprise asset management systems. So it really spans the whole breadth of our application portfolio and just regular communications.
Elyse Lowe (03:53):
Yeah, thank you Jonathan. If I could just add to that that the development services department as a permitting function for the city of San Diego really does depend on our collaboration with the city’s overall department of IT. Their expertise lending it to us as part of our business strategy is just absolutely critical. And so we have been able to work through a number of things creating governance to guide us as we put forth our strategic plan and for the department of IT to help us understand industry best practices and where we need to make some tweaks as we look at our plans going forward.
Joe Morris (04:40):
I want to stick with you for a second there Elyse and talk about maybe some of those tweaks. Everything that you just said really describes a team that’s not operating in silos. It’s really tight-knit. But when we get to the real world, things are changing all the time. You’ve got real world service needs that are that are evolving maybe beyond that strategic planning cycle. So maybe you could spend a little bit of time walking us through how you ensure that the two teams stay locked together and align with business needs as kind of the needs evolve.
Elyse Lowe (05:07):
Well, I would definitely say that development services follows the lead of IT. I mean, their expertise is absolutely critical to our success. But we convene, our teams convene, if necessary, weekly or more to ensure that we’ve really worked through all of the issues that come up. You know we have found that when we do run into a situation critical that everyone is able to jump in. Our teams are so dedicated if necessary. We put in time after hours just to get through every detail. Development services is such a big operating enterprise function for the city of San Diego. We cannot let it ever fail. And so working towards all of our fail safes and ensuring that we’ve got the right tweaks and that we’re headed the right direction. That’s how we’re really supported. So we spend a lot of time together as well as we have agreements on how our departments will operate.
Noam Reininger (06:13):
So in terms of those agreements, one of the things I know that you both mentioned that works really well together is governance. So you have a lot of accountability. There’s a lot of clarity on what’s going on. Roles are really clear as well. If we unpack that a little bit and talk about how you’ve set it up, what does the governance structure look like in terms of meetings, structures, rituals, and how have you brought that to life? Maybe Jonathan, you can start us with that.
Jonathan Behnke (06:40):
Sure. We’ve got a formalized governance structure in administrative regulation. And that really defines the roles and responsibilities, the roles of the different departments, making sure that the applications are supportable, that they’re secure, that we use our platforms and standards when we can, when they’re available.
And there’s also a strategic technology advisory committee that every director of the city is a part of that meets annually and does work in between the annual meetings and that’s to ensure that the city is prioritizing its resources for the projects that have the greatest strategic fit and have the most benefit to the city, have the best return on investment.
And so all of that work is actually presented to city council in closed session every year so that they have insights into the risks that we’re addressing as we’re doing modernization and how those are benefiting the city internally, how those are benefiting the public. And we also have a strong data governance program that’s really stressing the value of the city’s data. So all of those put together are the partnership that we try to bring to departments like Elyse and the other city departments for governance.
Joe Morris (08:19):
Elyse, what I’m picking up so far is that this continuous improvement seems to be foundational to the success of this partnership. What really piqued my curiosity is how do you build that mindset into your organization? Whether that’s your meetings, your project delivery, especially across a jurisdiction the size of the city of San Diego.
Elyse Lowe (08:38):
Working for development services is like being on a rocket ship and you have just got to get in and jump in and hang on because there’s so much happening in terms of our change management. So the mindset comes back to we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it together. There’s just it’s such a big moving force that we’re all always in it together and we have each other’s backs and we hear each other out. It’s a really great team atmosphere pretty much at all times and it’s really been able to contribute to our success. I think it’s driven by every one of the team members wanting to deliver the best product that they can to our customers.
Noam Reininger (09:26):
So together, Elyse and Jonathan, you’re driving a tremendous amount of change. And Elyse, you mentioned how critical the services are that you deliver to the city. And so, you know, quality, on-time delivery got to be paramount. And you’re engaging with a whole bunch of stakeholders. You have, you know, both of the staffs, all these different departments, you have external stakeholders. And so as you’re running these large transformation efforts and doing a tremendous amount of change management, how are you keeping all the stakeholders engaged and on the same page within both of your organizations? Maybe Elyse, we can start with you kind of how you’re doing it on the development services side and Jonathan how that manifests on your end with IT.
Elyse Lowe (10:07):
Well, I would say on two fronts. So the internal front and then the customer front. Development services is such a force because we are a one-stop shop. We operate differently than other large cities. We’ve been able to bring everything under one roof which makes the change management a little bit more palatable at least easier to do due to the way that we can consolidate and have efficiency and training and testing and all of those different things. But as far as engaging our stakeholders and our customers, it’s such an important piece and we have a training department as well as our subject matter experts that regularly reach out to customers. We have a quarterly technical advisory committee meeting with our customers specifically about digital process and implementation and changes to how all of our permit flow works. And we record webinars, training webinars. So that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if someone has a question on a technical aspect the answer is typically there and a lot of ongoing feedback. We meet monthly with the building industry association and hear a lot from users of the system about what their successes and pitfalls are and we’re always just very focused on the customer feedback about how we can improve our system.
Noam Reininger (11:35):
Wow. So Jonathan, I’m curious with all that change that Elyse and her team are pushing, how are you keeping your side of the house engaged and up to date with all of the changes?
Jonathan Behnke (11:50):
Yeah, we’ve done an annual IT services survey and directly tapped Elyse’s team to provide feedback on the services and scale and Elyse and her team’s operations have a large scale. So anytime they make a move, we want to make sure that we can support it technically. And then as we do those larger projects, you know, we have a project management requirement to make sure that there’s a project manager running all different aspects of the project and the technology. Organizational change management initiatives again to make sure that there’s appropriate training that we’ve got the right level of adoption that communications are taking place at the right frequency. So everybody is in the loop and you know we’re successful in those projects and the scale that they take place in IT.
Elyse Lowe (12:54):
It’s really I would just add that it’s really helpful to have the roadmap that the IT governance came through with the city’s administrative regulation on that because we always know what we need to do sort of next on the checklist. It’s been really helpful.
Joe Morris (13:10):
Jonathan, you mentioned the word scale, and that’s what stood out to me in the prep for this episode was the sheer volume that you have within the city. I think it was roughly around 70,000 approvals that have been processed, something like 140,000 inspections were done in 2023 alone. Significant volume for any city, let alone a city of your size. How has the partnership, the governance, everything that we’ve talked about today allowed you to scale your operations to not only maintain that service quality, but also like keep the resident experience, the government experience high at that on top of that priority list.
Jonathan Behnke (13:44):
And it is all about scale. So as we work with Elyse and her team, we’ve done quite a bit of cloud transformation to scale up to meet the levels of services that they’re providing, make sure that the customers have a good experience. There’s no latency. So we’ve expanded our IT infrastructure and we’ve built in service level agreements on the backend to make sure that we’re hitting three nines or five nines of availability with the services and constant monitoring to make sure that if there are issues encountered that they’re found immediately and the incident is taken up with our incident response team. And then I’ll note just a bright point. Elyse was one of the first departments to expand Power BI and reporting and again we needed scale to do that but Elyse and her team have done some great work on data and analytics again at a scale above a lot of the other departments.
Elyse Lowe (15:04):
We’re always pushing the envelope.
Noam Reininger (15:08):
In all my interactions with you, Elyse, I’ve learned that you really are all in the name of delivering better and better services for your constituents. And so, you know, other municipalities that want to replicate some of what you’ve both done together, really leveraging the partnership, the governance to move really quickly for your constituents. I’m curious what some of the lessons learned are and specifically if you know another municipality wants to start, where would they start and what are the first steps to putting together what you’ve been able to do? Maybe Elyse, we’ll start with you and then we’ll go to Jonathan.
Elyse Lowe (15:47):
Sure. I think a lesson learned when you’re undergoing a significant transformation if you are shifting from paper to digital is keep in mind that your initial focus will be on ensuring that your employees are well trained and understand new programs and new functionalities. But it’s just as important to ensure that your customers find that same level of education to feel comfortable with the permitting process.
Joe Morris (16:17):
It sounds great. And Jonathan, how about you know lessons learned, places to start from your point of view?
Jonathan Behnke (16:25):
I think the theme of this discussion really that IT business partnership is the starting point and strong communications. You know, Elyse talked about some of the lessons learned and when IT is in part, you know, in those discussions, we can make appropriate changes to help drive improvements or suggest some things that maybe we have in our portfolio that can help or do cloud transformation. And then just knowing roles and responsibilities. We might assume that the department is doing something or they might assume we’re doing something. So it’s important just to have those roles and responsibilities well defined and you know that gives you the ability to put together a multi-year roadmap and I think that’s really important work that we’ve learned from each other on is seeing some of the large endeavors that IT is taking on and what are the impacts to Elyse and her team as we’re doing digital transformation and then as Elyse and her team are driving big improvements, more scaling more automation, you know, what are we doing to support them. So that constant communication, I think really helps get both departments aligned and then our contracted services behind the scenes, managed service providers, just making sure that everybody’s going the same direction and we’ve got that multi-year strategic plan in place to guide our paths.
Joe Morris (17:57):
I have no doubt that the two of you aren’t taking your foot off the accelerator anytime soon, but as you look forward, how do you see this partnership evolving? Whether that’s opportunities that we haven’t talked about today, whether that’s data, AI, the customer experience, what has you really excited about the continued work together? Maybe Jonathan, you can kick that off.
Jonathan Behnke (18:20):
I think that’s the most exciting part of the partnership. As it runs into emerging technologies I will ping Elyse and say hey Elyse I see this great technology—maybe it’s artificial intelligence workflows whatever it might be that your department services might be able to drive some improvements and so we’ve done pilots together and the feedback from Elyse and her team have been really helpful for us so I really do lean on Elyse and her department for innovation in the city, emerging technologies with the scale that they operate at. They are great partners for innovation and emerging technologies.
Elyse Lowe (19:05):
And I’m excited about that too. And Jonathan’s overseeing the artificial intelligence development citywide for what our city will allow to go forward and that overall governance. And it’s been great to have some of my team members be a part of that developing that policy on behalf of the city of San Diego.
Noam Reininger (19:29):
Well, Elyse and Jonathan, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I think San Diego is truly a model of how to move really quickly and roll out digital change that impacts constituents very positively. And the partnership that you have and the governance model that you have in the city is really a model for other cities to emulate.
Joe Morris (19:50):
Yeah, for local governments everywhere, it’s a powerful reminder that collaboration isn’t just a value, it’s a strategy. And as San Diego has demonstrated, that strategy delivers real results for residents, staff, and the entire community. And for all of our listeners, thank you for joining us on the Civic Innovators Podcast. Until next time, ask that next bold question.
