The Naughty & Nice List for Municipal Leaders

Essential Insights from 2025: Tech, Process, and Leadership Lessons

As 2025 winds down, many municipal leaders are doing what they always do at this time of year, closing budgets, wrapping projects, and quietly asking, “What actually moved the needle?”

After spending the year working alongside municipal teams on digital, service, and organizational initiatives, a few patterns kept repeating. Different municipalities, different pressures, but very similar friction points. And just as often, very similar breakthroughs.

So instead of another year-end trends piece, we thought we’d keep it honest.

Here’s our Naughty and Nice List for municipal leaders, based on what we saw play out in real projects this year. Think of the Naughty List as habits worth leaving behind in 2025, and the Nice List as areas where focus paid off and should continue into 2026.

The Naughty List: Habits We Need to Break

Assuming Technology is a Silver Bullet
We saw more than one municipality invest in new systems, only to be frustrated months later when little actually changed. The reason was rarely the technology itself. Without aligned processes, clear decision rights, and real accountability, digital tools often just automate existing friction instead of reducing it. Technology enables change, but it does not create it.

Operating in Departmental Silos
This remains one of the biggest sources of resident frustration and internal rework. When departments optimize their own workflows without looking at the full service, even simple requests become complicated. Residents do not experience your org chart. They experience handoffs, delays, and unclear answers.

Neglecting the IT Department’s Own Processes
We saw a familiar irony this year. IT teams are often asked to help improve business processes, yet their own intake, prioritization, and decision processes are left untouched. When IT took time to fix its own ways of working, the payoff showed up quickly in clarity, capacity, and credibility.

Over-Promising on Shared Services
Shared services continue to attract attention, often for good reasons. But they are hard to do well. We saw situations where enthusiasm outpaced readiness, leading to strained relationships and unmet expectations. Starting smaller, with clear roles and deliverables, consistently worked better than ambitious promises that could not be sustained.

The Nice List: Actions We Need to Prioritize

Focus More on the Resident Perspective
The strongest improvements started with a simple shift, mapping services end to end from the resident’s point of view. When teams stepped outside departmental boundaries and looked at the full experience, the most obvious fixes often had nothing to do with technology.

Start Small to Deliver Quick Wins
Progress did not come from massive transformation plans. It came from mapping one high-volume service, bringing the right staff together, and identifying two or three practical improvements. Reducing handoffs, clarifying ownership, or removing unnecessary steps built momentum fast.

Upgrade Your Web Content
One of the most effective changes we saw was also one of the simplest. Improving web content. In several municipalities, updating the most visited pages reduced calls and emails faster than any new system implementation. Clear language and task-focused content still deliver one of the best returns available.

Strategically Outsource and Adopt Cloud Systems
Municipalities that were most effective with limited capacity asked a hard question. What truly needs to be done in house? Outsourcing infrastructure, security, and routine operations through cloud or managed services freed staff to focus on work that directly supports residents and organizational goals.

Prepare for ERP with Alignment
ERP demand is growing fast, and the pressure to move is real. The municipalities that were best positioned took time to align leadership, clarify objectives, and prepare staff before jumping into procurement. Those steps may feel slow at the start, but they prevent expensive problems later.

Looking Ahead

The lessons from 2025 were not about chasing the newest tools or launching the biggest initiatives. They were about focus, discipline, and doing the basics well.

As you head into 2026 planning, what is one habit you are leaving on the Naughty List? And which item on the Nice List will you double down on next year?

We’d love to hear what this year taught you.