City of San Diego Delivers Exceptional Digital Services Through IT-Business Partnership
The City of San Diego, located in Southern California, is the second-largest city in California and home to over 1.3 million residents. With a vibrant economy and growing population, San Diego manages significant operational demands while maintaining its commitment to exceptional service delivery.
San Diego implemented the Accela Civic Platform to manage its Development Services operations, processing over 70,000 permit approvals and 140,000 inspections annually. By integrating Power BI analytics and cloud infrastructure, San Diego efficiently manages a variety of services while maintaining 24/7 digital access for residents and businesses.
The Challenge
Large-scale municipal operations processing 70,000+ permit approvals and 140,000+ inspections annually require seamless IT-business coordination. Without clear governance, departments operate in silos, technology decisions become reactive, and service quality suffers. San Diego needed a sustainable framework for aligning IT capabilities with business objectives while maintaining exceptional service delivery at a massive scale. The city required infrastructure that could scale without compromising performance and a governance model that would prevent reactive decision-making. Additionally, San Diego needed to ensure that both internal staff and external customers were supported through digital transformation, maintaining satisfaction while modernizing operations.
The Solution
To address these challenges, San Diego implemented a comprehensive IT-business partnership model featuring formalized governance through administrative regulation defining roles, responsibilities, and standards. The city established quarterly roadmap meetings aligning application portfolios with strategic priorities and created a Strategic Technology Advisory Committee with all city directors prioritizing investments. This included multi-year strategic planning preventing reactive technology decisions and clear role definitions eliminating assumptions about who does what.
San Diego implemented weekly coordination meetings for active projects and developed a robust data governance program emphasizing data as a strategic asset. The city conducted annual IT services surveys gathering feedback from business units and invested heavily in cloud transformation to meet service demands. Development Services became a leader in Power BI reporting and analytics, operating at a scale above other departments.
The city implemented service level agreements targeting three to five nines of availability (99.9% to 99.999% uptime), backed by constant monitoring and an incident response team. San Diego also developed comprehensive customer engagement strategies, including quarterly Technical Advisory Committee meetings with customers, recorded training webinars available 24/7, and monthly Building Industry Association meetings.
“The partnership starts with communication. 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, we do quarterly roadmap meetings with each department looking at their application portfolio and planning ahead.”
− Jonathan Behnke, Chief Information Officer
The Benefits
The formalized IT-business partnership model provided San Diego with multiple benefits. It created high availability with 99.9% to 99.999% system uptime and scalable infrastructure through cloud transformation supporting massive transaction volume. The solution enabled real-time analytics with Power BI deployment at scale across departments and provided 24/7 customer support through recorded training webinars accessible anytime.
The partnership fostered a continuous improvement culture with teams dedicated to ongoing optimization and established a citywide best practice model studied by municipalities nationwide. It created a future-ready framework for AI governance and emerging technology adoption. The governance structure enabled both departments to understand how large IT initiatives impact Development Services operations and how Development Services’ scaling needs influence IT infrastructure planning.
“When you’re undergoing a significant transformation, if you are shifting from paper to digital, keep in mind that your initial focus will be on ensuring that your employees are well trained and understand new programs and 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.”
− Elyse Lowe, Director of Development Services
The Results
The governance model delivered measurable operational results. The city achieved 99.9% to 99.999% system uptime with 24/7 customer access via recorded webinars and digital portals. San Diego established quarterly roadmap meetings between IT and business units, quarterly Technical Advisory Committee meetings with customers, and monthly Building Industry Association stakeholder meetings. The city implemented weekly project coordination meetings for active initiatives, annual Strategic Technology Advisory Committee meetings with all city directors, annual IT strategic plan updates, and annual presentations to city council on technology strategy.
The partnership created transparency that extended to city leadership, with IT presenting the strategic technology plan to city council in closed session annually, providing insights into modernization risks, benefits to internal operations, and public-facing improvements. Development Services operates as a true one-stop shop, bringing planning, building, and permitting functions under one organizational roof, making change management more efficient through coordinated training, testing, and implementation across all functions.
The City of San Diego successfully created a sustainable framework for ongoing evolution rather than periodic transformation projects, enabling the city to adapt as technology capabilities expand, constituent expectations evolve, and new challenges emerge—without the disruption that often accompanies major system changes. Municipalities across the country are studying San Diego’s governance model because it delivers measurable results while maintaining quality and aligning technology investments with strategic priorities.