Boston’s critical non-emergency 311 system is undergoing a major modernization effort to better serve its more than 670,000 residents.
The city is replacing the system’s legacy software, which lets residents submit service requests or access a range of city services via phone, website or app.
The goal of the project is to replace outdated technology with a new constituent relationship management (CRM) system and asset management system to deliver a better experience for its users: both residents and the city teams who respond to the more than 1,000 requests made through Boston 311.
Santiago Garces, the city’s current CIO, is an engineer by training who started his career in South Bend, Ind., when politician Pete Buttigieg served as mayor. Garces eventually became South Bend’s chief innovation officer, later served as the CIO of the City of Pittsburgh and has been Boston’s CIO for nearly four years.
Garces spoke with InformationWeek about the current overhaul of Boston 311, the challenges of the legacy system, progress the city has made and how he hopes to continue improving the experience for residents of Boston.
The legacy system
Boston’s current 311 system dates back to 2008 and has become difficult to maintain. The system evolved to manage resident requests, and for the work done by the city employees responding to those requests.
“It was starting to serve so many different purposes. It was starting to lose the architectural clarity that would make it easier for us to maintain and upgrade, and keep developing,” Garces said.
The current overhaul marks the second effort to update the system. The city unsuccessfully attempted to replace the system under Mayor Marty Walsh, Boston’s mayor from 2014 to 2021, according to Garces.
“The previous attempt to get out of the CRM had been almost four years, where nothing went live and at a cost that was almost four times as high,” he shared.
This time around, Garces described the effort as more organized and strategic. The process began with developing a request for proposal (RFP).
“We needed a CRM that was going to be really flexible, very powerful, useful for the operators in the 311 call center [and] would orchestrate a lot of information moving across different systems,” Garces said.
Santiago Garces, CIO for the City of Boston. [Source: The City of Boston]
The city needed that CRM to integrate with a work order and asset management system; the city uses Cartegraph to manage its physical assets. Garces and his team also recognized there was a lot of variance regarding digital enablement across the various city departments.
“We knew that there were some pieces of the operation that were highly digitized, like people in streets and highways, street lighting, and then there were other departments that had not had the level of investment and support before,” he said.
CRM and workflow platform Creatio and its partner Keen360 wasn’t immediately on the city’s radar, but it emerged as the vendor of choice. Creatio offers no-code, cloud-based and AI-driven software that the city anticipates will streamline the 311 experience for constituents and city employees. Keen360 supports implementation.
“We initially did not think that we were going to go for a platform that was so heavily low-code, no-code solution, partially because we thought that we were going to have to have a separate low-code, no-code solution to piece together,” Garces said.
Being a local company — Creatio is headquartered in Boston — worked in its favor. “We knew that if there was someone who’s going to care about the roads not being plowed properly or trash collected, they [have] skin in the game,” Garces said.
Boston finalized the contract with Creatio in 2024.
Implementation of the CRM system
Garces said at the beginning of the implementation process, he knew the city would need an agile delivery approach. He and his team broke the project down into milestones with the goal of learning how to quickly build in the Creatio platform.
The first milestone focused on informational cases, instances when people reached out for information that didn’t fit into a structured case. Previously, these calls and emails were not tracked in the CRM. Garces said he and his team wanted an easy way for the city to know who contacted 311 about what going forward.
“Over 50% of the volume of calls were those kinds of informational inquiries, and in less than three months, we had that in production,” Garces said.
The city continued to move through the project’s milestones with the goal of completing the full overhaul of the 311 system by mid-2026. Garces described the project as on track, estimating that between 40% and 60% of the system’s functionality is in production.
“It’s almost like open-heart surgery. We’re replacing these core systems that really run the city,” Garces said. “We’re rerouting things that traditionally had gone to the legacy system to go to Creatio, and making it seem from a constituent standpoint that nothing has changed.” Behind the scenes, everything is changing about how the information is processed and which team receives that information.
While a project like this requires significant planning, execution requires a degree of flexibility. The weather, for one, influences the kind of city services people need. Garces and his team shifted the timeline for the streets and highways elements of the project until after winter and bumped up the timeline for the parks department before spring, when those city employees are busiest.
“Our teams and my colleagues in public works and streets do an incredible job. They’re like magicians. They make everything go in the right place,” Garces said.
In the midst of the project, the city ran into another issue it ultimately solved by leveraging Creatio. During the 2024 presidential election, some of the city’s polling locations had an insufficient number of ballots, drawing the attention of Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin.
The city needed a new system to track issues during election days, and it was able to use the Creatio platform to build it.
“That was a side project in the middle of this massive project. But it is because we had a tool. … We had the support structure. We had great partners,” Garces said.
Ongoing improvements
The 311 project is expected to be complete later this year, but Garces said he doesn’t expect the work to stop.
The city is exploring ways that AI could enable better experiences for 311 users. Garces and his team also want to enable multilingual capabilities and interactions on the platform. “We’re making the City of Boston behave the same way that some of the best, most sophisticated companies in the private sector are working,” Garces said.
