The city of Dallas has launched three applications to aid with tackling and providing technology support for city employees to serve their constituents during Covid-19.

Smart city technology has been a priority for Dallas officials for some time. The city’s IT executive Girish Ramachandran defines a smart city as one that “focuses on improving the quality of life of all citizens by adopting new forms of governance, public participation, process improvements, technology adoption, data-driven decision making and provides sustainable services”.

Ramachandran said the pandemic had placed special emphasis on a critical domain where the city was already focusing, the shift to self-service. This shift has become more relevant today to enable constituents and employees to work remotely. He said in this digital age and especially in the event of an emergency, residents and businesses in Dallas needed to be able to conduct business from anywhere.

“Though these are challenging times for local government, service organisations and the community, this crisis also offers the opportunity for us to strengthen our ability to respond, learn and mitigate its impact by embracing a new digital transformation strategy,” said Ramachandran.

Washington-based Incapsulate’s interactive citizen calendar app enables the city’s constituents to schedule appointments online and helps city employees manage appointments while delivering safe low or no touch customer service. Constituents can check-in at an appointment location and manage their appointment from their mobile device.

In parallel, Dallas launched Incapsulate’s online forms app, providing the city with the ability to digitise, configure and publish online forms and applications. These apps help to enhance the welfare of residents, visitors and businesses in Dallas.

The city is also leveraging Incapsulate’s workforce app allowing it to report proactively required information on work safely. Employees can self-check-in using the mobile app or web portal, or by calling into the city contact centre. The city can set up automatic case creation and assignment, as well as automatic priority setting and customised case notification. This allows city employees to report, update and manage returning to work safely in an effort to deliver to their constituents.

With more than 50 state and local clients, Incapsulate has built a portfolio to assist governments with various aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It is important we focus our portfolio in two core areas with our government partners: the need to help our clients get Covid relief to residents and businesses ranging from vaccines to financial assistance; and the need to make government more digitally accessible,” said Joanathan Light, senior vice president at Incapsulate. “Helping government employees modify their tools and processes to work from anywhere is essential as they meet the needs of individual residents and the local business community.”

These pre-built services on Salesforce are deployable in months to help governments meet customer demands, faster and with more predictability.

Since 2008, Incapsulate has helped organisations realise digital transformation and achieve lasting results with the Salesforce platform. Incapsulate has more than 200 employees, with over 450 Salesforce technical certifications, and an additional 50 technical certifications in other cloud platforms.

Incapsulate is a certified partner of Mulesoft, Vlocity, Tableau, Clariti, Box, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and ESRI. Headquartered in Washington DC, it has offices in Boston, Toronto, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad.