Sandpoint native named Boston's first digital officer

SANDPOINT — With the advent of the Internet and the age of social media, cities have more options than ever when it comes to serving their residents.

It’s Lauren Lockwood’s job to examine those options and separate the wheat from the chaff. As Boston’s very first chief digital officer, her aim is to rethink the way the city delivers its resources and information to residents. The new position is a big step for Lockwood, who graduated in 2004 as Sandpoint High School salutatorian.  

“One of the most important things digital communication affords is two-way communication,” Lockwood said. “We’re really figuring out how to utilize that for the benefit of (residents).”

For a major American city like Boston, meeting the needs of its millions of residents efficiently and capably is no small order. Lockwood sees digital communication as an essential tool in harnessing that civic responsibility, but providing an intuitive user experience is far from intuitive in its own right. Fortunately, Lockwood has spent her career working with startups and banks focusing intensely on that very issue.

As always, it’s often best to focus on one step at a time, and when Lockwood officially starts her job in December, she has her eyes set on the city’s website.

“Doing something as simple as taking the city’s website and redesigning it is a good place to start,” she said.

According to Lockwood, the site contains a truly massive amount of information, but actually finding that information can be a chore. Lockwood intends to reorganize the site in a way that makes more immediate sense. For instance, rather than burying pertinent forms or information in a sea of links, she envisions a system where users are greeted with common inquiries that lay out information learly.

If a person needs to change his or her primary residence, a clear answer to that question is only a click away.

Social media platforms like Twitter are another tool Boston needs to take out of the toolbox, Lockwood said. Have a problem as a city resident? With the right system in place, an answer could be as simple as tweeting the mayor’s office.

Lockwood’s status as Boston’s first chief digital officer is thanks to new mayor Marty Walsh. One of Walsh’s major goals is transforming the city into a beacon of technology, and he created the position to lead the charge in digital communication.

A series of job interviews allowed Lockwood to express what she found lacking with the city’s digital resources, and apparently, she made a compelling argument.

“I envisioned a series of the pain points as a citizen and how we might approach them,” she said.

Her credentials probably made a solid case as well.

A recent graduate of Harvard Business School and program manager at HourlyNerd, her education and aptitude for data analysis and user experience floated her to the short list of final candidates.

Lockwood traces some of her comfort in the digital world to web design and programming classes taken at Sandpoint High School. Meanwhile, work on the yearbook staff with now-husband Ben Lockwood, the 2004 valedictorian, prepared her for work in communications. She said she owes a lot of her life 10 years later to Sandpoint experiences and is always eager for her regular homecomings.

“I think anyone who grew up in Sandpoint knows what a special place it is,” she said.