Franklin County named a Top 10 digital county

Launch of the GX Foundry was a key consideration in the rankings

Government Technology’s Center for Digital Government announced their national 2024 Digital Counties Survey winners in multiple county population categories last week at the annual NACo conference.

Our very own Franklin County, Ohio was included in the survey of counties with 1,000,000 or more residents. Counties were evaluated on a variety of factors, including “…initiatives that streamline delivery of government services; provide data analytics to allow decisions based on performance and outcomes; enhance cybersecurity; and apply innovative and emerging technologies to county priorities.”

And Franklin County took the number 10 spot on the list, due to investments in cybersecurity, data analytics, and… digital services (that’s us!).

How the GX Foundry played its part

The summary in the award announcement points to our team (boldface added):

IT leadership in Franklin County, Ohio, last year focused on improving the government experience for residents. To accomplish this, county enterprise IT created a team called the GX Foundry in 2022, which last year helped move the county to a new content management system and worked with 44 agencies to overhaul the county’s website so services would be easier for residents to find. The team also created a “state of the county” website with which the commissioners can share information about what the county is doing. For bookkeeping and financial management, they used the low-code tool Quickbase to build an application for identifying unclaimed county funds, which allowed the county to retire technical debts and build interfaces for apps used by both the public and internal staff.

Huzzah! We’re thankful for the recognition and we’ve been honored to do the work we’ve done so far.

But we’re not done.

Indeed, we’re excited to keep moving ahead, because wow… there’s so much more to do! That centralized county website? It’s still being developed behind the scenes, with a small launch earlier this year and a much, much bigger launch coming in early 2025.

And we have more ideas for expanding our impact for the public and internal teams across the county. Hopefully we’ll be able to make the required investments to bring modern, human-centered digital services to more county teams and residents.

Thanks to the Center for Digital Government, and special thanks to our fearless CIO, Adam Frumkin, who supports our mission and highlighted our work for the award.

Check out the full list of winners in the 1,000,000+ county category. Or check out the list of #1 winners in all the county size cohorts.