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Goodyear IT details plan to automate employee processes, cites onboarding as first target
Summary
City IT reported results of a staff survey identifying paper-based and duplicate workflows, and recommended prioritizing quick automation "wins" such as onboarding, travel approvals and financial reconciliations.
City of Goodyear Chief Information Officer Lisa Faison told the council in a work session Oct. 6 that IT has identified specific employee processes that could be automated or digitized to reduce duplicate work and paper handling.
The assessment stems from a citywide survey IT conducted of 118 employees across departments to find processes that still rely on paper or duplicate data entry. "IT conducted a survey of a 118 employees across all the departments," Faison said, describing the research that produced three prioritized areas for action: repetitive workflows (for example, travel approvals and reimbursements), duplicate data entry across multiple software systems (onboarding and financial reporting), and paper-based data collection.
The results matter because the city spends staff time rekeying information across systems and manually reconciling records. The nut graf: IT recommended pursuing high-impact, low-difficulty projects first, using the city's continuous-improvement approach and existing governance bodies such as the IT executive steering committee and a smart-city committee.
Faison said the team will target digitizing paper forms, building integrations that let data be entered once and shared across systems, and using Power BI to automate recurring reporting. As an example, she cited a budget-monitoring dashboard built with finance staff that allows departments to view refreshed budget data without receiving manual Excel exports and emails from staff. "These dashboards are available and refreshed on a regular automatic basis," she said, crediting Ryan, the finance and budget research manager, with building the report.
Council members asked about timelines and resources. Faison said quick wins can often be completed in about 30 days, while more complex efforts can take up to six months depending on documentation and integration difficulty. She also said IT will prioritize projects based on value and available bandwidth rather than attempting all projects at once.
IT plans to return with progress updates and success stories, and councilmembers asked that onboarding be an early focus because of its high volume of manual work across departments.
Ending: Faison said the city will continue using continuous-improvement practices and the executive steering committee to prioritize and stage implementations, and will report back to council on outcomes and timelines.
