De La Rosa questions 311 software updates after 911 outage

On August 18, 2026, New York City experienced a significant 911 service disruption after Motorola, the city service provider, performed a routine software update.

Approximately 1,700 calls were impacted during that outage.

If I recall correctly, IBM is the principal vendor supporting the 311 system.

And during...

Prior testimony, you stated that a joint team of OTI, IBM is responsible for 311 system updates.

Can you walk us through the standard process for implementing software updates to 311?

Thank you for the context.

And yes, I can give you some of that perspective.

I probably can't go deep as some of my colleagues at OTI would, but I can give you a flavor of that.

And I think the starting point would be to make a distinction.

So the work that we do with IBM and what was previously referenced, we do that for mostly for what we call applications development.

So for the system that you see online or the system that gets used in the call center, the application side of that, not the telephony system.

Okay.

So those are two separate.

And then most recently.

The telephone system.

So the telephone system is actually the source system.

The platform is a Cisco platform.

Cisco.

Which is pretty common across the city.

Mm-hmm.

And then back on the application side, as we in the past would have referenced IBM, the OTI is now using MWBE.

e-contracts more so than the IBM contract.

So that work, though, is similar.

We're contracting for specific skill sets and specific work that can help us develop and build out in our application.

In some cases, you know, you bring it on, you help build it, and then you don't need it anymore.

But all of that gets overseen and managed by the OTI organization.

Okay.