Municipal "Digital Service" corps

In New York City, municipal tech workers often earn one-half or one-third of private sector peers. Rigorous Civil Service exams create additional hurdles to recruitment. Both factors mean city government draws on a smaller pool of potential talent. Other levels of government in the UK and US have established "Digital Service" corps, which are able to do"targeted hiring outside of civil service processes on fixed-duration contracts". Rebooting NYC: An Urban Tech Agenda for the Next Administration argues this approach could work for cities, too. A proposed New York City Digital Service could bolster the city's technology capabilities by reducing reliance on expensive consultants, bringing the development of specialty products and services in-house, and providing surge capacity for special projects.

This proposal suggests that cities will leverage the establishment of tech leadership roles created over the last decade (CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, CPOs), by expanding their small tactical teams into full-fledged internal departments that can source tech talent faster and more effectively at scale.