Business challenge

How can a city deliver the best service possible to the community and make it a safe place for people to live, work, raise families and retire? This goal led the City of Tyler to explore and implement innovative technologies that can extract the real value of data to better serve and protect people to ensure they get maximum value.

Transformation

By partnering with IBM, Tyler is able to gain the highest possible degree of protection for privacy and security, maintain transparency and community engagement and foster data sharing between departments, helping the city and its employees became true data champions.

Results

Dramatically

improve access to data and hundreds of terabytes of videos

Minimize

the risk of serious security and public safety issues with threat detection solutions

Render maps within seconds

instead of 15 minutes to the Tyler Fire Department

Business challenge

City safety is top priority

The City of Tyler needed to increase efficiency, improve employee productivity and enhance community services. The city also needed to make more informed decisions based on real-time insights. The city’s chief of police wanted to make Tyler the safest community in the state of Texas by equipping its officers with connected devices. The department wanted to take advantage of available data to make the city inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

“ In Tyler, we take pride in what we do. We want to deliver meaningful services. It’s the Tyler way. ”

— Benny Yazdanpanahi, Chief Information Officer, City of Tyler

Transformation

Technology is key to extracting the real value of data

By engaging IBM Business Partner Mark III Systems to implement IBM Cloud for VMware technology and IBM flash storage, the City of Tyler uses its new central data platform with advanced data management capabilities to improve system performance, scalability and cost efficiencies. The newly implemented IBM Storage solutions also provide a data-driven hybrid multicloud storage architecture.

Using data to better understand and serve the community, the City of Tyler is completely transforming with the latest technologies in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, analytics and IoT. This translates into excellent services based on the data collected from various sources and advanced analytics solutions.

Today, technology touches every part of the city. Everything is data driven, digitized, connected and updated in real time. The City of Tyler delivers value to its citizens—making sure that they have the data they need, when and where they need it.

The powerful technology that the City of Tyler implemented allows them to focus on improving city-wide departments, connecting people, networks, applications and devices that span a vast range of services—police, fire, utilities, traffic and city centers—all in real time, with continuous reliability and security. AI is built in with tools that are cloud ready, easy to learn and use, simple to connect and worry free.

“ If we didn’t have the technology – we’d probably need 50 more officers on the streets. ”

— Jimmy Toler, Chief of Police, City of Tyler

Results

Real time data keeping citizens safe

IBM technology allows Tyler to help dramatically improve data access with hundreds of terabytes of videos that are available 24x7 to the public, offering greater transparency and better experiences that fundamentally change the way the city interacts with its citizens.

The innovative technologies help to minimize the risk of serious security and public safety issues enabling the City of Tyler to achieve new levels of efficiencies and empower their workforce with readily available information at their fingertips.

Based on advanced IT capabilities which allows efficient data collection and processing from various sources, the Tyler Fire Department was able to immediately improve its services. Rendering fine details of maps which formerly took 15 minutes - now takes only few seconds. 

With the right data, real-time threat detection solutions and the analytics technologies, officers can be at the right place at the right time, reduce crime and make more informed decisions based on real-time insights.

City of Tyler, Texas

The City of Tyler, in Texas, is the county seat of Smith County. The city government offers public safety, transportation, parks and recreation, and sanitation services for a population of approximately 107,400 people. The Tyler City Council comprises a mayor and six district council members who represent the citizens. This group acts as the policy-making body of the city's government, determining the overall goals, objectives and direction for city services and adopting the annual operating budgets for all city departments.

Solution components

Take the next step

To learn more about IBM Storage, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage

City of Tyler - Video Playlist