Case Study: Tyler Texas

Future‐focused Friendly Environment

As America’s Rose Capital, the City of Tyler, Texas lives up to its impressive nomination. The bustling city is home to over 99,000¹ residents. The city welcomes thousands of tourists to its annual Texas Rose Festival and many other magnificent events year‐round. The colorful city of Tyler is also considered to be the advanced manufacturing, health‐care and retail center of East Texas and is proud to be Texas’s first Certified Retirement City.

Noting the rising trend² in mobile phone usage, Tyler felt the growing demand for “processing‐on‐the‐ go.” It saw a need to develop its own city app that would provide users access to information on the spot.

Adaptive Planning

Tyler took the best features from other municipality apps and followed suit. As development began, Tyler envisioned new ideas and was later introduced to the flexibility and vast customization capabilities of the MyCity App powered by MyCivic Apps.

Tyler and MyCivic Apps set out to create an app that would showcase new features serving the needs of its residents and visitors as well as help to streamline processes within the city. The requirement to integrate their existing 3‐1‐1 online reporting using Superion’s product Naviline³ as well as expanding the list of issue types onto the MyCivic Apps Request Management system has created the need for parallel processing.

What started out as drawing inspiration from existing city apps has become a momentous undertaking – a mission to design and develop an app that would echo the brilliance of the city it serves.

Full‐Service App

Through the relentless dedication of Tyler’s Information Technology team, headed by CIO Benny Yazdanpanahi, and the MyCivic Apps Team, the city app, MyTyler, has advanced into a powerful tool for the residents, visitors, and for the city.

MyTyler has proven to be a city app with unparalleled features, as shown here in this local news report⁴:

Highlights of the MyTyler App:

• Allowing users to report issues and experience firsthand the swift action the city makes in attending to and resolving the reports, encourages residents and visitors to be more involved in improving the city.
• The “Downtown” and “Around Tyler” sections helps boost economic development supporting local businesses and events.
• “Traffic,” “RouteShout,” and “Airport” sections help make commuting effortless.
• Many other information‐specific features like “City Hall,” “Parks and Places,” and “Library.”The MyTyler app is a product of vision and uncompromising endeavor to provide quality service to the city’s residents and visitors. Tyler’s I.T. team and the MyCivic Apps team continue to develop the app, integrating insight extracted from the MyCivic Apps’ Analytics.

1. http://www.city‐data.com/city/Tyler‐Texas.html
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast‐of‐smartphone‐users‐in‐the‐us/ 3 https://www.sungardps.com/solutions/naviline/
3. http://www.tylerpaper.com/TP‐News+Local/236498/my‐tyler‐app‐puts‐city‐services‐at‐residents‐fingertips