Inside South Bend, Indiana’s journey creating a digital service team

South Bend, Indiana, is part of a rapidly growing number of state and local governments developing digital service teams to modernize and improve government solutions. Only two years into operation, the Midwest city’s team is quickly gaining ground to deliver results and stake its claim, one official says. 

Digital service teams broadly aim to address challenges with and make enhancements to governments’ digital services, resources and other systems, Keith Wilson, talent engagement manager at U.S. Digital Response, recently told Route Fifty. Digital service teams are a particular priority for state and local leaders looking to drive government efficiency and effectiveness amid increasing constraints, like staff and budgetary shortfalls. 

Nationwide, approximately 16 of 56 U.S. states or territories have established a digital service team, and there are at least 36 such organizations in federal, state and local governments as of late last year, according to Georgetown University’s Beeck Center. 

But acquiring the staff, budget and mindset to create a digital service team can feel like an uphill battle amid governments’ competing priorities, Lucy Macfarlane, director of South Bend’s Division of Digital Services, told Route Fifty. 

The city’s digital services division launched in 2024, but city officials began laying the groundwork for its creation more than a decade ago, she explained. 

In an interview with Route Fifty, Macfarlane shared how South Bend officials gained leadership buy-in to create the digital services division, and how it has leveraged early momentum to solidify its long-term value. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ROUTE FIFTY: Leading up to 2024, what did it look like for you and your team in terms of designing and developing the digital service division initiative? 

LUCY MACFARLANE: The city’s digital service team is relatively new, but plenty of the work that we do and we embody has existed in the IT department in various ways over the years. 

Around 2013, for example, civic innovation was kind of the thing. Organizations like Code for America were still young, and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg fostered a culture at the time to think differently. How could we solve this problem in a different way? I think Buttigieg and Code for America had quite an influence on each other. So in the early days, we as a department had quite an entrepreneurial spirit when we had that executive-level credibility and authority to solve digital problems. 

We were also lucky in the state of Indiana that there were fewer legislative constraints around software and vendor procurement, so we were able to respond to solving a problem by either buying something or doing process improvement. I think the momentum that we were able to capitalize in those early years turned into political will later to sustain the digital services team.

ROUTE FIFTY: What were some of the team’s early projects that helped you gain leverage to progress forward? 

LUCY MACFARLANE: What we really cared about prioritizing was evangelizing the sentiment, ‘Hey, we want to help with your personal productivity and alleviate that administrative burden that you are feeling.’ We wanted to prove our value and prove we exist. The digital service division’s first push was a lot of hacking stuff together, like engineering a digital form to automatically push responses to a SharePoint list and send email notifications to staff members. 

We realized the hacking approach could be operationally really difficult to manage later, so we eventually shifted to accepting more resident-facing work. We weren't really feeling like we were capitalizing on impact with those kinds of internal things, but then we felt really good when we started touching like the resident side of stuff. The last few years, we’ve prioritized web accessibility and resident touchpoints, such as enhancing digital forms. 

The hacking approach felt worth it because our end user has no idea what's happening behind the curtain, but they're just getting the product that they want — and that actually ended up being most of what people wanted from us, especially internally.

ROUTE FIFTY: How does the city’s digital services team approach other officials and leaders to get buy-in for the division, particularly when it comes to budget support for your mission? 

LUCY MACFARLANE: Now, when we’re talking about our work or we’re talking with internal partners about digital transformations or digital experiences, the first thing I tell them is if you are doing something in your daily work, and copying and pasting a lot in a spreadsheet is the bane of your existence, that should be a red flag to give the digital services team a call. We might be able to help you identify what the problem is that’s burdening you and support you with some workflow automation or just general process improvement. The team also serves on behalf of residents to improve their experience, so we’re at this lovely crux of both of those things because they go really well together. 

The best example is our city’s approach to website management. That responsibility sat across many people in the IT department, so there wasn’t a clear owner, and it degraded the user experience, the technical robustness of the tool and its security. I think our former Chief Innovation Officer Denise Reidl, who served from 2019 to 2025, saw the writing on the wall around capacity constraints and had to prove we couldn’t do this work without the dedicated resources to do it. She worked with other agency directors and U.S. Digital Response to determine the specific roles and responsibilities that a digital services team would assume, which helped officials communicate clear benefits and costs to operating a digital service team. 

ROUTE FIFTY: While we’re talking about digital services in government, can you share how new and more advanced technology, like artificial intelligence, is impacting the mission or capacity of your division?

LUCY MACFARLANE: I think just to put it really simply, we see artificial intelligence right now as like a tool in our tool belt, because part of our like mantra as a team is to be solution agnostic. We always approach a problem by trying to identify the problem accurately, and then when we take a step back we might say, ‘Oh, this combination of things might help us solve this problem. Sometimes it includes agentic development tools, and sometimes it doesn't.’ We try to be as not prescriptive as possible in our solution design, because we want to meet the problem where it is. 

Of the same token, agentic AI development is so appealing and it is so wonderful. Before it felt like we needed four more solutions and service designers when we were hacking stuff together because there were just so many moving parts, but now it feels like less of a burden now and we can actually kind of like do a little bit more with less. We’ve been able to flex our muscles around custom work and custom-built applications, which is very exciting and makes the work feel more sustainable. 

It feels like we are slowly shifting into a product shop, which I think is very different from the original intention of the team, which is kind of crazy. It's been less than two years.

ROUTE FIFTY: What’s in store for South Bend’s digital services division moving forward? What other projects and broader initiatives are coming down the pipe in the next year or so? 

LUCY MACFARLANE: Myself, my counterpart on the application side of the team, our digital integrations development director and our chief digital officer are actually setting aside time next week to kind of like have a fun conversation about that and how we will manifest our own kind of destiny. 

One really cool thing that we’re going to wrap up the year around is testing the user experience of a beta redesign of the city’s website, which launched a few weeks ago, including content strategy and navigation. then we might have a relaunched website in Q1 or Q2 of next year, which is very exciting and I think kind of a huge deal for a small team in about three years. 

Our department also won the Bloomberg Mayor's Challenge Award for this year, which is a $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. With the grant, we're doing really cool work with predictive analytics and machine learning in partnership with the University of Notre Dame. Focusing on agentic development, we're going to launch a case management solution for our casemanagers and our customer success team in early Q4.