City & County of Denver accelerates the delivery of government services

Challenge

Connecting residents and businesses to 50+ government agencies

In this digital age, the world is at our fingertips. You can order food, book travel, and pay your bills with a click of a button. The City and County of Denver (CCD) wanted to bring the same digital experience to Colorado residents and businesses — giving them the opportunity to renew their driver’s license, apply for a permit, book a COVID-19 test, and conduct other government-related services online.

Objectives

Facilitating a digital-first approach to government services

Bringing an innovative digital citizen experience to life involved:

• Connecting legacy IT systems and critical data to new cloud-based services across over 50 agencies
• Implementing new technologies to enhance the delivery of law enforcement services to Denver residents
• Streamlining key government services such as licensing, permitting, etc

The CCD team turned to a leading enterprise integration solution: MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™

Solution

Building a dashboard for government services by leveraging the power of APIs

Before MuleSoft, the CCD team leveraged Oracle’s ESB solution, which slowed down innovation and required frequent, time-consuming updates, custom integrations with multiple single points of failure, and very little documentation or reusability.

With MuleSoft, the City and County of Denver migrated away from Oracle and, instead, used Anypoint Platform to build API integrations and connect hundreds of legacy systems — facilitating real-time data integration to facilitate 311 requests, planning permits, service orders, and more. The migration to MuleSoft took just under a year, compared to the 2+ years it took to migrate to Oracle ESB.

Integrating all of these legacy systems paved the way to digitizing government services. Prior to MuleSoft, processing parking tickets, arrests, bookings, and other services required logging into multiple systems — including legacy systems for the police, sheriff, and justice department — and filling out manual paperwork, which led to many hours of work and slow processes.

With MuleSoft, CCD was able to surface the key data from all these legacy systems into a single dashboard with real-time metrics that provides law enforcement with the visibility they need to better support our criminal justice processes.

Improving citizen lives by streamlining licensing, permitting, and COVID-19 testing

Beyond digitizing law enforcement services, legacy technology got in the way of a great digital experience for requesting key government services, such as licensing, permitting, and application requests.

For citizens, this was a manual, time-consuming process where they had to fill out paperwork. And, similarly, government employees had to review paperwork as well as log into multiple systems to process the service requests, including third-party systems such as Esri ArcGIS for address locator and geo mapping services.

The CCD team said goodbye to this time-consuming process after implementing MuleSoft. They simply reused the same APIs they built for their previous projects to build a single, self-service portal using Salesforce Lightning. The portal enabled citizens to easily request government services and, on the other end, allowed government employees to review all information in a single interface in near real-time.

Then came COVID-19. Similar to other government entities, COVID-19 caught the CCD team by surprise. During the beginning of the pandemic, they were asked by the Mayor to get a COVID-19 testing site up and running in just one week.

The CCD team quickly created a custom web portal that provides citizens with information on COVID-19, where to get tested, and enabled them to book testing appointments with just a click of a button. They were able to launch the web portal quickly because the CCD team simply reused APIs they have built for previous projects.

Results

Launching new projects faster with API integrations

With Anypoint Platform and an API-led approach to integration, the CCD team can now launch projects much faster by reusing 36% of their APIs for new projects. Additionally, they were able to release their new self-service portal in just 3 months and their new COVID-19 web portal at lightning speed — just one week.

“With MuleSoft by our side, we not only feel confident that we can respond to any urgent requests that come our way, but we now have more time to innovate on the digital services we provide to Colorado residents,” said Robert Bruns, Applications Development Director, City and County of Denver.