The City of Syracuse maintains its records and data systems in a variety of siloed systems ranging from internally managed mainframes, cloud based third-party applications, all the way to individual spreadsheets stored in shared drives or personal computers.

Through Mayor Walsh’s signature initiative for inclusive growth in the new economy Syracuse Surge, the City has vowed to incorporate data in decision-making throughout departments, promote the use of advanced analytics techniques to solve business problems and incorporate Internet-of-Things sensors for improved data capture. The underlying infrastructure to gather and share data at scale, however, is still in its infancy. Through a partnership with Microsoft, Syracuse University and Onondaga County, the ‘Syracuse Digital Innovation Alliance’, the City has moved forward with using Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform and building an Enterprise Data Platform within that environment. This has been a collaboration between the Department of Information Technology (IT) and the Department of Accountability, Performance and Innovation (API).