Find Posts By Topic

Accela Awards the City of Seattle a 2023 Trendsetter Award

The SDCI/Seattle IT team accepts the Connected in Purpose award.Employees from SDCI and Seattle IT attended the Accela annual conference, Accelarate, September 23 – 27 in Washington D.C. The City of Seattle was honored at the recognition luncheon with an Accelarate Trendsetter Award for “Connecting in Purpose – Permitting System Integration” for the Seattle Services Portal (on the Accela platform). The annual conference and Trendsetter Awards are opportunities for agencies in the US to connect and learn from each other to move governments forward to improve services to the public. The award recognizes government agencies as well as individuals who embrace technology and digital modernization to deliver reliable services to their communities.

SDCI started working in earnest over 10 years ago on a better technology solution for customers. This work started when the department was the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) with an in-house Information Technology team, and has grown and evolved to a City-wide platform serving multiple departments and helmed by a central department of Seattle IT. This evolution created and supports an enterprise-wide tool for consolidating and streamlining permitting workflows.

Here are some of the highlights that support the award:

  • Since 2017, Seattle has expanded its use of the Seattle Services Portal from 1 to 11 departments through 15 new implementations.
  • The number of public users has grown exponentially from 990 in 2014 to 195,444 as of September 2023. This is growth of nearly 20,000%!
  • The City of Seattle’s current enterprise-wide Seattle Services Portal (Accela system) managed by Seattle IT has:
  • 1,211 City staff using the system
  • 329 unique record types
  • 31 integrations with other City systems
  • 3,150+ custom scripts
  • 425 reports
  • The applicant Portal:
  • Recently released 10 new fully integrated custom pages
  • Uses extensive customizations to add, hide, and move data on product pages to support user suggestions and feedback on usability
  • Uses technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to add information and change page layouts for greater accessibility and mobile responsiveness
  • The City routinely conducts usability studies that results in new features and updates to improve user experience of the Portal